Kiwi artist, Julian Oliver, presently based in Berlin, produced this provocative project to take note of. Elegant, well-designed, and with an explicit message for the misanthropic agglomerations of hierarchic power that are in extreme need of … detonation!

Rod sent an invite along from Nate Larson for another one of these evolved digital projects — screen shots of artist’s computer desktops.

the radio aporee ::: maps project reached a downright Taoist level today with the uploading of the 10,000th global collaborative phonography sound sample. I was watching closely as the numbers crept upwards and timed it so that my latest batch would coincide with this day — it seemed auspicious. I’ve uploaded a total of 621 four-minute files from twenty countries. By my accounting, the 10,000th sample, my 615th recording (at the 550 bus stop on the LTU campus in Bundoora at Plenty Road) follows:

If you go to the main interface at aporee::maps and go to ‘search’ in the lower left, and choose the ‘:::maps’ option and type in ‘neoscenes’ (check the ‘place, sound’ button) — you will get a full scrolling list of my contributions. Or, you can simple click on the aporee category in this blog and have the locations come up there as small maps as above.

Kudos to the initiator, artist, phonographer, (cook!), and programmer behind the project, Udo Noll — thanks much for giving all us participants the possibility to … participate … in your creative dreaming!

Mika arrives back in town a few days ago from Newcastle and presenting Temp°Sauna at electrofringe (part of the this is not art event). the Nordic Embassy finds out and asks him to present the project — in the foyer of the Dendy Cinemas right on Circular Quay next door to the Opera — for the opening of a Nordic Film Festival. I cruise by on Thursday to help with the set-up which is a bit tricky because of a blustery wind blowing the entire evening, at one point almost knocking the whole rig over with the red-hot Finnish Army wood stove cranking away. there is a fancy opening with plenty of Finlandia vodka drinks, sushi, and posters from Saab and so on. at any rate, he managed to get a couple of the gals associated with the Embassy to jump in the sauna. I did too, with only one question — when would the next opportunity arise to do a real Finnish wood sauna there on the Quay? it was plenty hot, and we had a good laugh hanging around in towels as did the guests watching us at the opening reception. it’s a nice scene, and so I hang around to help shut everything down after some hours.

back again tomorrow?

mikropaliskunta is back again! An expedition collects artists to explore the nationality of a tourist in Canary Islands 03-10.march.2009 The travel can be followed in real-time at renewed website http://www.mikropaliskunta.net

mikroPaliskunta is a series of interdisciplinary expeditions exploring contemporary imagined nation called Finland and its eco-social changes in a sustainable way. mikroPaliskunta has already made two expeditions: across Finland from north to south by a biodiesel car with a stuffed reindeer in 2006 and around Berlin by bicycles in Germany in 2007. This spring, the group starts a series of expeditions themed The Finnish on Holiday. The first expedition in the hell triangle of tourism is made to Canary Islands – the ever-popular holiday destination and a border shore for African refugees risking their lives to enter European Union. Following two expeditions head to entertain centers in Vantaa and Lapland in Finland The Finnish culture is moved to warm climate in Canary Islands. How does tourism intensify presented national identity in tourists themselves and in local people? Also, the affects of mass tourism from perspective of economic depression and ecological awareness is an interesting subject matter, explains media artist and member of the expedition Mari Keski-Korsu. mikroPaliskunta website is renewed for the Canary Islands expedition. As with the earlier expeditions, also this expedition can be tracked almost in real-time. The artists of the expedition work with their own individual themes producing articles, photographs, videos, maps and a series of performances about coffee drinking as a social phenomenon. All the materials about this and the past expeditions are exhibited at the website. Members of the expedition include media artists Mari Keski-Korsu and Mika Meskanen, photographer Eija Mäkivuoti, author and scriptwriter Taina West. Researcher of sustainable consumption and production Satu Lähteenoja is a special guest of the expedition. mikroPaliskunta is supported by Arts Council of Finland and Finnish Cultural Fund.

January 2-22 the NomadicMILK project by GPS artist Esther Polak travels to Nigeria. There she is using the satellite technology to track both the distribution of “Peak” brand milk from harbor city Lagos to the capital of Abuja as well as a nomadic Fulani family of cow herders in Abuja’s vicinity. By showing the people involved their own tracks and videotaping their responses to it she creates a reflection on current nomadic life.

A custom built robot accompanies her to Africa. Once fed the GPS data it draws the people’s recorded routes using sand, allowing large groups of people to gather around the image and reflect communally.

Esther Polak has been following the dairy economy for some time now. During her previous MILK project she tracked how milk from Latvian farmers ended up in Dutch cheese, earning her a Golden Nica award at the Arts Electronica festival. Milk, she says, has always been a fundamental part of our diet and as such has sculpted our lives and our landscapes.

Her activities can be followed live on the nomadicmilk blog as well as via a twitter account she updates via SMS.

moving through the lonely darkness of nothing, approaching the event horizon, Light bends and throws the shape-shifted carrier of one handed broken hewer of brain’s goblet by ~lokialex

Jodi sends an announcement about one of her curatorial efforts, Sound Constructions, in collaboration with Program: Initiative for Art and Architectural Collaborations. it’ll be good to see this crew all together!

Sound surrounds us, moves through us and affects our perception and experience to place and space in more ways than we usually imagine. The sound of knowledge being produced in scientific labs, the sound created by the ears themselves, the vibrations of the city playing a new kind of music, wavelengths of the wall coming from the front line in Sarajevo, the secret voice of bridges transmitted across the globe, the sound of radio waves in the ether, sound as intervention back into the street, and creating an imaginary city with sound, all come together in a fascinating weekend forum.

April 26 through May 4 is Sun Microsystems’ Worldwide Volunteer Week; a mass mobilization of Sun Microsystems’ employees to volunteer their time. We are seeking project options that utilize the IT knowledge and talents of these employees.

If your organization has an IT related need, please email Dan Zucker at daniel.zucker@sun.com so he can share with Sun’s volunteer community. Because these projects are volunteer, there will be no charge to your organization for these services.

Key parameters of projects include:
-Need to engage 2 or more people
-Project will happen between the dates of April 26 – May 4

a house that EJ’s company Arch11 recently finished shows up in Sunset Magazine. nice work!

Jan has this installation and documentation Black Cloud — with a nice remix of Lebanese radio that he gathered during a recent visit there — Love is in the Air.

Man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren! — Paul Watzlawick

finally getting around to a good look at Oog, a curatorial project by Dutch artist Nanette Hoogslags curates at Volkskrant, a major Dutch daily newspaper. I happened to meet her for the first time when I was in Amsterdam last March when I had dinner with she and her husband, network activist David Garcia, an acquaintance of mine. Nanette comments on the current state of the project:

Oog is a commentary and opinion platform for the online edition of De Volkskrant, a major Dutch daily national newspaper. It began in September 2004 as a platform where every week a different artist working in sound and image is asked to respond to news and current affairs. The selection of artists participating has grown into a varied group of national and international artists working with very different forms of expertise and approaches. In this way, artists are using their skills to become commentators on events in a news environment. After each week, the work is placed in the archives, making the Oog collection accessible as a whole.
(more …)

finally meet Marc and Ruth of Furtherfield at the home of the HTTP gallery in northeast London. plenty of good gossip about the UK scene, some histories, making connections between events, names, and faces, and so on.

passing this on from editor Lloyd Dunn — a marvelous resource and inspiring source — the online photostatic ‘zine archives are now complete! Enjoy!

Over the last five years, the editor of PhotoStatic Magazine (1983-1998) has been gradually converting all of the issues of the series from their published form (on paper) into pdf files for the public to download. We are pleased to announce that the final installment of the archive (PhotoStatic no. 1) has been posted, and so the archive is now complete. All of the downloads are freely available, and 100% copyright free (as they have been ever since 1983).

During its run, the PhotoStatic Magazine series underwent several transformations, as some issues were published under differing titles, which include: PhotoStatic Magazine, PhonoStatic Cassettes, Retrofuturism, YAWN: Sporadic Critique of Culture, The Bulletin of the Copyright Violation Squad, and Psrf. In addition to the 49 print issues released between 1983 and 1998 (which includes two issues of double the normal page count), the archive also includes 10 issues on audio cassette (down-loadable as mp3s) as well has a handful of supplemental releases.

PhotoStatic was a magazine, a periodical series of printed works that focused on xerography as the source of a particular visual language that was widely used by graphic artists in the various art and music underground scenes of the 80s and 90s. During this time, the publication served as a forum to collect and redistribute artworks that originated in these scenes. Eventually, its scope extended to embrace not only graphic works, but also concrete poetry, correspondence art, ephemera from works in other media, essays, fiction, reviews, and reports on various cultural scenes, including Neoism, the home taping community, the zine community, and mail art.

the SCANZ project, taking place in New Plymouth, New Zealand is in its final stages, an oblique offshoot of the polar/solar residencies. Ken Gregory has a nice blog and a cool kite project (at night above); along with avatar body collision and the weather blog — small hints of a nice time.

former student of mine, Eija Mäkivuoti, announces an exhibition of her photographic work titled As Everyone Else at Gallery K in Helsinki. the work is about the everyday life of disabled children at the Tornionseutu school. it also includes Polaroid photographs by the children themselves. there is a selection of these images and other photographic work by Eija at her web space.

John Sobol, Canadian poet, musician, writer, and self-proclaimed cultural catalyst along with pianist Wayne Kelso offer these intriguing new mp3 word-jams from Flying Wolf Media.

former student, Michael Phipps keeps up on his painting and techno-topian musings at the with-style network and blog. this is an image of a recent piece — Butterfly Cybernetic.

Jim sends an invite to a current show at Studio 258 in Denver — brought to you by discopie.com. this is one of my favorite designs that Jim has available at discopie — that you can get it on everything from thongs to buttons to tee-shirts. irreverent, thought provoking, and always with a wicked sense of humor. over our 15+ year friendship, it’s always a nice surprise to see what’s happening in his studio in Denver. and it’s one of Loki’s favorite places to go, ’cause he always walks away with a special little gizmo from the many glass cases filled with jetsam from the High Water Mark of the Amurikan cultcha of the millennium shift. yessiree!

this photo by Stefan — Evon at Dettifoss in Iceland this past summer. he’s got that elvin smile which is some combination of that of his mum and dad.

got the idea when nothing is there to add, I would take an image from incoming email attachments. there are so many of those. and it traces the depth of the inbox. this is another image from John Douglas‘ — always pro-vocative, pro-locative, and pro-optical imagery!

something to check out:

Sonic Supper is a friendly venue for curious music. We use the telephone to share sound with a large and broad audience. Yes it is that simple: call the number to listen to a few minutes of music. Leave a message to tell us what you think. New music is featured weekly.

surfing around, finding activity online to fill star-skyed nights. it is precisely these micro-scaled actions that have meaning far beyond the macro-scaled political maneuvering.