Lyon 2007

There are now 103 biennials around the world, mapping news that is growing exponentially, apparently renewable at will, and interchangeable. Flux is prevailing over singularity. One hundred and three biennials, 103 lists of artists, 103 titles... a biennial opens roughly every three days, and they cover one another. Their mechanics inhabit and generate a perpetual present, stretching to infinity. How, then, can a biennial still have critical authority? In 2003 and 2005, we opened a debate on this new form of temporality ?firstly on the programmed future, and then on duration.

And now the debate continues: starting with the conviction that there must surely be a history to news and an archaeology to the news of news (the undifferentiated present), I invited Stehanie Moisdon and Hans Ulrich Obrist to reflect upon this challenge and conceive the 2007 Lyon Biennial. Their ambition is clear: to open the century and name the decade, but with humour. The 2007 Biennial will thus be a game, played as it should be with the utmost seriousness; it will explore issues to do with players, of course, but also with polyphony and, especially, the essential place occupied by the artist.

Thierry Raspail
Artistic director, Lyon Biennial


The 21st century hasn't yet begun, the century has to begin!
Alain Badiou

The next Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art will open on 17 September 2007. The project devised for this 9th edition by Sethanie Moisdon and Hans Ulrich Obrist is a history book written by a number of people. The history of a decade yet to be named; of a present that is endlessly arriving.

The project is structured like a grand game, with rules for selecting and casting the roles; a game in which some 50 players from around the world are invited to invite an essential artist of this decade. The ultimate purpose of this game, in which invitation is the rule, is to produce together an original landscape, to rethink the format and grammar of contemporary art biennials, and to create living matter from the archaeology of now.

This history book, published on the occasion of the biennial, is both the project's origin and its horizon. It is conceived as a space open to different voices and trajectories. It will comprise essays by philosophers, critics and historians, and the manifesto texts of each player, centred on a particular vision of the present and of what is happening on the contemporary creative scene. The dynamic system which develops through the formation of this community, enables us to reach beyond generational, geographical and thematic axes and to shift the hierarchies and conventions of knowledge into a feedback loop.

november 30-december 3: Upgrade! International: DIY Oklahoma City

International Upgrade! organizations and their artists will converge in Oklahoma City to present art and ideas to each other and the community in the second annual international symposium. Included in the event will be workshops on art and technology, audio/video performances and presentations, and exhibitions of works by international and regional artists representing this year’s theme: DIY (Do-It-Yourself). Upgrade! Boston will contribute the following:

DIY or Die: An Upgrade! New York, Turbulence, and Rhizome Net Art Exhibition

In celebration of their respective ten-year anniversaries, Turbulence and Rhizome collaborated with Upgrade! New York to present an exhibition of works that they commissioned or presented over the course of their histories. The term D.I.Y. (or do-it-yourself) expresses an independent ethos, one that encourages cultural producers to create and distribute work outside mainstream or commercial systems and often in direct confrontation with them. In this case, D.I.Y refers not only to works in the show, many of which create alternate models for collaborative artmaking, community building, and media distribution, but to the organizations themselves whose missions--to commission and present digital art work--had no tradition or cultural niche to call upon. Historically, net artists have included audiences in their work; many created calls to action that compel their audiences to intervene and contribute their own ideas, stories and histories. From re-purposed commercial software to homegrown digital knitting applications and works that offer alternative constructions of identity and nationality, D.I.Y. OR DIE presents a cross-section of Internet-based art that, much like punk and grassroots activism has the urgency and invention required to change existing standards of art practice.

Imaging Oklahoma City by John (Craig) Freeman

Participants will go out into the streets to produce the material for "Imaging Oklahoma City." "Imaging Place," is a place-based, virtual reality art project that takes the form of a user navigated, interactive computer program combining panoramic photography, digital video, and three-dimensional technologies to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities.

Artist and educator John (Craig) Freeman's work has been exhibited internationally including at the Kaliningrad Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts, Russia; and Ciberart Bilbao, Spain. In 1992 he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lucy Lippard cites Freeman's work in "The Lure of the Local".

networked_performance: participatory art by Helen Thorington

The networked_performance blog (http://turbulence.org/blog) chronicles network-enabled practice, discloses a wide range of perspectives, and uncovers commonalities. Artists are utilizing technologies that are inexpensive, mobile and wirelessly networked. Thorington will review works - from telematic and locative events to wearables, and responsive objects and environments - and show how they use objects and events from everyday life to create work that is characteristically hybrid, performative and relational.

Helen Thorington is a writer, sound composer, and radio producer whose radio documentary, dramatic work, and sound/music compositions have been aired nationally and internationally. Thorington has created compositions for film, installation and dance. She performed with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at The Kitchen, New York City in 2003. Her articles on networked musical performances are published in the December 2005 and February/April 2006 issues of Contemporary Music Review.

Participation, Technology, and Musical Performance by Jason Freeman

Jason Freeman breaks down conventional barriers between composers, performers, and listeners, using new technology and unconventional notation to turn audiences and musicians into compositional collaborators. He will discuss "Glimmer", "N.A.G.", and "Graph Theory" which connects composition, listening, and concert performance by coupling an acoustic work for solo violin/cello to an interactive web site. There will be a ten minute performance of "Graph Theory."

Jason Freeman received his D.M.A. in composition from Columbia University. His music has been performed by the American Composers Orchestra, Speculum Musicae, the So Percussion Group, the Nieuw Ensemble, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and Evan Ziporyn; and his interactive installations and software art have been exhibited at the Lincoln Center Festival, and the Transmediale Festival.

A Day in the Life with Burak Arikan

Boston, Istanbul, Munich and Oklahoma City will be connected via internet with simultaneous live streaming video performances from each location.



Upgrade! International: DIY Oklahoma City
John (Craig) Freeman
A Day in the Life
DIY or DIE
Helen Thorington
Jason Freeman
DIY Recipe [PDF] [catalogue entry for Upgrade! Boston]

Oberhausen – Call for Submissions

Oberhausen, now in its 53rd year, is one of the major international crossroads for the short form. It is unique in the range of forms and genres it presents to the public, and particularly well known for its spotlight on experimentation.

The festival which will be taking place 3 – 8 May is now open for submissions for the 2007 competition. Deadline for submissions is 15 January 2007 (postmark), and there is no entry fee.

Further information about the festival and entry details can be found on the Oberhausen Festival website http://www.kurzfilmtage.de/

re:place 2007, the Second International Conference on the Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology, will take place in Berlin

Introduction
re:place 2007, the Second International Conference on the Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology, will take place in Berlin from 15 - 18 November 2007 as a project of Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt. This conference is a sequel to‘Refresh!, the first in this series, chaired by Oliver Grau and produced by the Database of Virtual Art, Leonardo, and Banff New Media Institute, and held at the Banff Center in Canada in September 2005, which brought together several hundred artists, scientists, researchers, curators and theoreticians of different disciplines.

re:place 2007 will be an international forum for the presentation and the discussion of exemplary approaches to the rapport between art, media, science and technology.

With the title, ‘re:place, we propose a thematic focus on locatedness and the migration of knowledge and knowledge production in the interdisciplinary contexts of art, historiography, science and technology.

The re:place 2007 conference will be devoted to examining the manifold connections between art, science and technology, connections which have come into view more sharply through the growing attention to media art and its histories over the past years. It will address historical contexts and artistic explorations of new technologies as well as the historical and contemporary research into the mutual influences between artistic work, scientific research and technological developments.

This research concerns such diverse fields as cybernetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, nano-technology, and bio-technology, as well as investigations in the humanities including art history, visual culture, musicology, comparative literature, media archaeology, media theory, science studies, and sociology.

Call for proposals
re:place 2007 (Berlin, 15 - 18 November 2007) welcomes contributions from established as well as from emerging researchers in diverse fields. The conference will be of interest to those working in, but not limited to, the following areas: art history and theory, literary studies, cultural studies, film and media studies, theatre, dance and performance studies, philosophy, history, gender studies, human-computer interaction, contemporary art, musicology, sound studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, science, technology and society studies, history of science, and history of technology.

We are especially keen on empirical, conceptual, and historical contributions that exemplify and expand the diverse methodological and thematic concerns of this extended interdisciplinary area. These might include contributions to:

- institutional histories of centers, sites, or events that have helped to concretize and engender the intersections between media, art, science and technology. Some broad areas could be: experimental arts spaces, collaborative research labs, significant exhibitions, etc.

- ‘place studies’ that highlight significant locations or situations where such interdisciplinary intersections or significant historical episodes have occurred. A few examples might be:‘Tesla in Budapest","Flusser in Brazil", "USSR in the 1920s", ‘Japan between 1950s-1970s,’ etc.

- historiographical issues, methods, and debates that pose critical questions in the formulation of the histories of the ‘media arts'. These might include: archaeology, genealogy or variantology as methodological tools, bridging the divide between art and media history, sociologies of interactivity, etc.

- theoretical frameworks from various philosophical and disciplinary positions. Topics might include the exemplary role of film studies or musicology for the study of media arts, or the significance of cultural specificities and location in media and technologies, etc.

- the migration of knowledges and practices from different contexts, whether disciplinary,institutional, geographical or cultural. Topics might include: the role of migrant artists in the development of new discourses and practices; the movement and adoption of disciplinary ideas from science into art contexts or vice versa, etc.

Submissions
A dedicated website and online paper submission system will be ready for submissions from 1st December 2006. Abstracts of proposals, panel presentations and posters will have to be submitted in either Text, RTF, Word or PDF formats.
The deadline for submissions will be 15 January 2007.
Information about the submission process and general information can be found at: http://tamtam.mi2.hr/replace

More retrospectives and histories of video art

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, video still

unitednationsplaza is pleased to present a seminar and a video festival organized by Martha Rosler: Art & Social Life; The Case of Video Art. The program will begin with a public lecture by Marta Rosler on Sunday, December 10th at 6 pm.

The video festival will present a selection of early video works, dating from 1968 to present, from the personal archive of Martha Rosler, including numerous works rarely seen and largely excluded from the canonical history of video art, and others that form the backbone of early video histories as now written.

The video program will be free and open to the public daily from 2 - 6 pm at the screening room of the unitednationsplaza, starting Monday, December 11th through Friday, December 15. The schedule of screenings will be posted shortly at http://www.unitednationsplaza.org

Martha Rosler: Art & Social Life; The Case of Video Art
December 10 - 15, 2006

The early history of autonomous video art is a pivot point in the internal culture wars of the art world. Starting in the late 1960s through the early 1970s, artists with quite diverse practices experimented with the new (but not yet widely available) portable video apparatuses.

Film had by mid-century superseded both architecture and music as the queen of the arts. But by the 1950s the broadcast television industry and its structures of celebrity were challenging the social status of high art. Television was a problem… and then the Portapak was invented. Video suggested varieties of freedom to artists restive about or dismissive of traditional studio practices. Video promised a sort of gesamtkunstwerk on the ruins of a high modernism that had demanded a strict separation between forms. Video offered not just the experience of time married to the illusion of space accompanied by sound; because of poor image quality, video also offered relative freedom even from the concerns of cinema/ art film/movies. It provided the opportunity to sketch or to perform, to record a gesture or a narrative, to sing in the shower or dance in the studio, abetted by simple in-camera edits. Artists could, without commitment, break free of the studio if they chose, and, in the political ferment and upheavals of the era, while look around, report, raise a voice, show a face, register anger, offer an opinion, analyze social structures and events, tell a joke, join with friends, and yell back at the mind-melting products of broadcast television while nevertheless making use of its capacity for instantaneous, unrecorded transmission and endless flow or using a recorded format that was easily reproducible and could be widely disseminated. The international potentials of this form were immediately obvious to artists and even museum administrators, to judge by the range of international 'video opens' of the mid-1970s-

The wide-open field of early video may arguably be the typical condition of a medium at birth (compare the internet, on its way from being a utopian arena of activity to a gated compound locked down by corporate toll takers, if the latter get their way). Despite the competition of sites like Youtube, video as an art form has become, by definition, an expensive captive of the gallery and museum, the black box inside the white box. But the transformative impulses that drove utopian hopes in the earliest days have not completely evaporated. It is absolutely vital to revisit early video works and their context (including the texts of the era), to provide a deep slice into the moment of origin and see what may be refurbished and adapted for the present —beyond the stylish appropriations of the 70s “look.”

In the face of the Society of the Spectacle, taking back/talking back to the media was a watchword of the era, offering the hope of social transformation through art, activism, and community interventions. This hope animates many today, in whatever form and medium it may be furthered.

***

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives, after spending the 1970s in California. She works in video, photo-text, installation, sculpture, and performance, and writes on aspects of culture. She is a renowned teacher and has lectured widely, nationally and internationally. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); as well as many major international survey shows, including Open Systems at the Tate Modern (2005). Her work has been included in the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and several Whitney biennials, and she has had numerous solo exhibitions. She has been invited to participate in Skulptur Projekte 07 in Münster as well as in documenta xii. A retrospective of her work, ‚Positions in the Life World,’ toured Western Europe and was shown at two New York museums from 1998 to 2000. Rosler has published fourteen books of photography, art, and writing. Among them are Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Essays 1975–2001 (MIT Press, 2004, An October Book, in conjunction with the International Center of Photography), the photo books Passionate Signals (Cantz, 2005), In the Place of the Public: Airport Series (Cantz, 1997), and Rights of Passage (NYFA, 1995). Sur/Sous le Pave (Rennes, 2006), like the much earlier If You Lived Here (Free Press, 1991) addresses the urban landscape and focuses on housing, homelessness, and urban life. Rosler has been awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005, the Oskar-Kokoschka Prize (Austria’s highest fine arts award) in 2006, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award for 2007. Her solo exhibition, L ondon Garage Sale, was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2005. Her installation Kriegeschaüplatze (Theaters of War) was shown in Berlin (Christian Nagel) in 2006, and a selected retrospective of her work was shown at the University of Rennes.

unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. Structured as a seminar/residency program in the city of Berlin, it involves collaboration with approximately 60 artists, writers, theorists and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. In the tradition of Free Universities, most of its events are open to all those interested to take part. unitednationsplaza is organized by Anton Vidokle in collaboration with Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Martha Rosler, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Nikolaus Hirsch, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Tirdad Zolghadr.

Seminar on “Digital Personas”, by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Guest speaker: Mark Amerika

Date: 25 Nov 2006 (Sat)

Time: 2:00-4:00pm

Venue: Y302, 3/F, Y Core, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Mark Amerika will present a sampling of his digital art work composed over the last 15 years. The presentation will include a mix of personal narrative, philosophical inquiry, spontaneous theories, and cyberpunk fictions, locating the emerging spaces where new media artists operate when distributing their digital personas.

Bio:
Mark Amerika, who has been named a ʺTime Magazine 100 Innovator,ʺ has had four retrospectives of his digital art work. He is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His net art, DVD surround sound installations, and VJ performances have been exhibited and featured all over the world including the Whitney Biennial, the ICA in London, and the Walker Arts Center. His DVD installation CODEWORK is part of the permanent collection at the Denver Art Museum. He is the author of two novels, has edited three published anthologies, and is the Founder and Publisher of the Alt‐X Online Network, a net art and new media writing site started on the Internet in 1993 (www.altx.com). His forthcoming book of artist writings, entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, will be published by The MIT Press later this year. Mark Amerika is currently directing his first feature‐length film, entitled MY AUTOEROTIC MUSE. His website is markamerika.com.

Cinema 2.0 or open source cinema

A Swarm of Angels updates the current filmmaking models of Hollywood and independent film to create cult cinema for the digital age.

Key concepts:
* Participative
Vote on major decisions, including which of two scripts goes into production. Post on the forum.
* Open source
Contribute to development and production through script input, materials creation, or be part of our distributed film crew.
* Creative Commons-licensed
Freely share the film. Sample project visuals for your own work.
* Crowdsourced
Feedback into the production, use your expertise, and become part of the team.

Whether you call it Cinema 2.0, or Open source cinema, it’s an innovative participatory experience you can be part of.

Our vision is to bring filmmaker and fan together into entertainment communities making distinctive films based on artistic choices not marketing ones. This is not about making a couple of bucks, but about making cinematic history.

A Swarm of Angels is a third way between the top-down approach of traditional filmmaking and the bottom-up nature of user-generated content. A way for anyone to influence the creation of a professional £1 million+ ($1.8M+) feature film.

We are gathering 50,000 people in a giant new media experiment to be part of an exclusive community which funds and helps make this film. We want people to freely download, share and remix the feature film and all original media made for this project and have embraced the flexible digital-age copyright of Creative Commons toward this end.

Invent the future of film, join the Swarm.

Inspiration from Hong Kong

Sources : Futherfield
F.wish is a new online project commissioned by Folly by Boredom Research based on the Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees. In Hong Kong near the Tin Hou Temple you can visit these trees, write your wish on a “bao die”, tie it to an orange and throw it up into the branches. If your wish is caught in the branches it is said to come true. The tree used to be a camphor tree where a tablet for worshipping Pak Kung was placed before it withered and became hollow. The myth goes that a worshiper prayed to the tree to fix his son who was slow in learning. The granted wish led to many more wishes being made of the tree.

F.wish has the same warm and friendly characteristics of all of Boredom Research’s work. Processing has not so much changed the style of their work but added to it allowing a greater amount of diversity than what is possible using Director, which although respected has been shied into being seen as a multimedia presentation platform that lacks the support of Java and Flash, especially on the internet. Some of the animated elements in f.wish move with a fluidity this author knows very well: the increasingly popular physics library for Processing. The “bao die” have been given a playful elastic nature and the text seems to drift in a blow away delightfully. I sent some questions to Boredom Research about their new piece and they were kind enough to give me some very exhaustive replies.

Read the interview.

All about Video art

Workshop 2.12.2006 (Sat)
Goethe-Gallery, Goethe-Institut Hongkong
14/F Hong Kong Arts Centre, Wanchai


Pictures : Bjørn Melhus, No Sunshine, Germany, 1997 |Rosemarie Trockel, Buffalo Billy + Milly, Germany, 2000 | Joseph Beuys, Filz-TV, Germany, 1970



10:00am - 12:30pm
Welcome note by Michael Müller-Verweyen, Director, Goethe-Institut Hongkong

Session 1 - Flash back to the last 40 years of Video Art
- The discovery of video art and the establishment of a video art archive

Speakers
- Wulf Herzogenrath, Director, Kunsthalle Bremen; Curator of 40 Years of Video Art
- Ellen Pao, Founder, Videotage

12:30pm - 2:00pm
Lunch break

2:00pm - 3:15pm
Session 2 - The impact of video art on the traditional art and vice versa
- How did the new technical options change our concept of art?
- What do people find challenging with new technology?
- Does technology bring video art to an end?
- Video Art vs Amateur Video

Speakers
- Isaac Leung, Programme Director, Videotage
- Yip Yuk-yiu, Assistant Professor, School of Creative Media, City University Hong Kong

3:15pm - 4:00pm
- Coffee break
Intermission - screening of video art works at Goethe-Studio

4:00pm - 5:30pm
Session 3 - Is video art the antiquity of new media art?
- How did video art change the definition of art, from its original documentary form to its new focus on visual impact?
- Internet distribution: how does the new trend of internet distribution influence video art (e.g. You Tube)?
- Is video art becoming a traditional art form (such as painting and sculpture)?

Speakers
- Tobias Berger, Executive Director, Para/Site Art Space
- May Fung, Video artist
- Wulf Herzogenrath, Director, Kunsthalle Bremen; Curator of 40 Years of Video Art

Programme subject to change.
Conducted in English. Admission free.

The '40 Years of Video Art - Digital Heritage' installation which takes place at the Goethe-Gallery from 2.12.2006 - 15.1.2007 focuses on saving, maintaining and mediating the cultural heritage of Video Art, which has become one of the most influential art forms of the 20th century. The works were shown in Germany earlier at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Düsseldorf before coming to Hong Kong, among them videos by Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, Christian Jankowski, Nam June Paik... etc. Apart from the package curated by Wulf Herzogenrath, Director of Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany, an overview of Hongkong-based video and new media art collective Videotage's own archive from the past 20 years will also be showcased in the installation.

Installation at Goethe-Gallery designed by: Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix

Blog and Podcasting : Lesson one

The blog and podcast workshop was openned last week at VAC. The main idea to introduce blog and podcast is to see these as creative media. We will try to delvelop critical and creative skill together. The first homework is to find and introduce three recommended blog sites:

Here is my selection:

Art And Technologies blog
1. Turbulence -a research blog about network-enabled performance. They included any form of networking in which computational devices speak to each other and create a feedback loop. They also qualified networked performance as being live, or experienced at the moment of creation or reception.
What the blog revealed and continues to reveal is an explosion of creative experimental pursuits made possible by the migration of computation out of the desktop PC and into the physical world (where it is becoming increasingly woven into the fabric of our lives), and by the continuing advances in internet technologies, wireless telecommunications, sensor technologies and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
2.A news and review blog- We make money not art (In China, we need money not art, translate wmmna plus their own news-- highly recommended) Another same family name but not the same character is we make art not money by China's web enterpreneur Isaac Mao.
3. Curated content by networked contributorsReblog by Eyebeam, hosted by a rotation of rebloggers, they are usually artists, enterpreneurs, technologists or theorists, These rebloggers will selected and reviewed interested news from blogspheres.

3 more blogs for resources and inspirations
1. newmediaFIX recommends online resources and projects; it offers news and occasional reviews, and periodically releases indepth texts on new media culture
2. Boing Boing
Magazine about media and popular culture.
3. Furtherfield is an online platform for the creation, promotion, and criticism of adventurous digital/net art work for public viewing, experience and interaction.


Just found blogs : To view and review/Media/ art/ work
1. (Older media art work)Expanded Cinema
Curated platform focused mainly on experimental film, early video, and sound-based, durational work. All of the material is being pulled from available media online elsewhere, as part of emphasizing an overlooked facet of the archival function of new media.
2. (Lectures and discussions)The research of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) focuses on collaboration in media art, technology, and theory with an emphasis on social contexts.
3. (Links to work)blog-art:
A blog of 'blog art' - blog-based art projects and other self-reflexively creative blogs. Blog Art is a project of Abe Linkoln & Marisa Olson.

CHARLES ATLAS: Hail The New Puritan Video 1975-2005

Tate Modern presents the first UK survey of work by video pioneer Charles Atlas, one of the the most acclaimed interpreters of dance, theatre and performance on video. His vibrant, provocative pastiches of narrative, performance and documentary have featured collaborations with international artists, performers and choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, Yvonne Rainer, Marina Abramovic, John Kelly, Sonic Youth, and Karole Armitage. For Atlas, the theatricality and physicality of dance and performance are points of inquiry into artifice, fiction and reality. This series features legendary videos, including Hail the New Puritan, Because We Must, Put Blood in the Music, and Rainer Variations.

For more information about the programme of screenings visit http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/film/charlesatlashailthenewpuritan.htm

The survey coincides with the European tour of Turning, Atlas’s new collaboration with Antony and the Johnsons ( http://www.forma.org.uk ), and Atlas’s solo exhibition Instant Fame!, which takes place 23 November – 3 December 2006 at Vilma Gold ( http://www.vilmagold.com ). Charles Atlas is a recipient of the John Cage Award 2006.

Douban Launched Blog Recommendation

Today social review service Douban launched blog recommendation. Formerly Douban has provided book, music, movie and travel reviews. This new feature has been mentioned by Yang Bo, founder of Douban, in his speech on Chinese Blogger Conference. According to a rumor, Douban is going to remove travel review feature so as to be more focused.

Currently the new feature doesn’t support OPML import yet. To add blogs into personal collections, users should search exsiting blogs or add new blogs one by one. New added blogs need to be verified before showing up in search result.

On landing page of blogs, users can change or vote for description words and logo image. This is China Web2.0 Review on Douban.

The idea of this feature is to find interesting blog from persons with similar interests. Personaly I think blog entry recommendation is more useful than recommending a whole blog to me. But certainly this is a cheap way to discover new blogs.

Douban was founded on March 6, 2005. Currenly it has more than 300,000 registered users, 1.2 million pageviews per day. See our previous coverage of Douban here. And this is an interview of Yang Bo by Xinhuanet several days ago.

Chinese Blogger Conference : Reminders and Reflections

On 28th and 29th last month, I was in Hongzhou not for the film awards but went to the 2nd chinese blogger conference.

One of the organiser, Isaac Mao, from The social Brain Foundation wrote "在年会上向大家介绍美国Blogger行为和网志空间特性的Deborah Fallows 来自Pew Internet &
Society研究所，PEW研究中心，加州大学伯克莱分校新闻研究生院和Middlebury学院正在研究中文Blog空间的写作和传播行为。在年会期间已经开始启动的调研工作是一个很好的开头，通过参与这些精心设计的调研问题，你也可以更好地了解自己的Blog行为和Blog环境，同样也支持了研究工作。" (Please support Pew)

http://www.51point.com/project_enter.asp?Fid=097&pr_id=691

Rebecca MacKinnon from www.GlobalVoicesOnline.org wrote in her blog her reflections on China's 2nd annual blogger conference.

Two speakers from Hong Kong :

Hong Kong Polytechnic University香港理工大学教授和游戏/创意技术专家 Gino Yu（于积理）在年会的Creative 2.0 板块（由孙田主持）和欧洲的艺术家进行了对话，并且分享了自己对Blog和Web 2.0的看法，以及用自己的家庭观念阐述了对生命2.0的理解。
他的演讲稿下载。

Another HK person comes from Inmedia talks about freedom of speech and the organisation.

News feed to new media art blog in China- to be continued

Demos
(New York)Daniel Shiffman
http://www.core77.com
http://blog.maxray.net/index.php
http://home.guestbook.com.tw/b2/index.php?mforum=cwcheng （台灣 鄭建文）

|| moneme.info || 11.06_12.06 ||

A new work by HK's best sound artist Cedric Maridet



info@moneme.com
www.moneme.com

Microwave Reviews

From Microplayground (Taiwan)
From Economic Journal (Hong Kong)

《牛棚書展2006──書就是書》

每年一度愛書人不容錯過的盛事──第四屆牛棚書展將於12月1日至12月4日，於牛棚大本營開鑼(土瓜灣馬頭角道63號牛棚藝術村)。遠離人煙稠密的會展，告別湊熱鬧的人龍，牛棚書展為愛書之人提供真正的閱讀空間。

本屆牛棚書展以「書就是書」作為主題，回歸基本，讓「書」當上真正的主角，透過連串活動，如書痴夜話、牛棚書獎、絕版藏書展、動手造書等，令普羅大眾重拾閱讀趣味。

本年度精采內容包括：

牛棚書獎：為推廣讀書風氣、鼓勵好書的出版，牛棚書展將於書展正式舉行前，舉辦首屆「牛棚書獎」，由牛棚書展委員會（評審顧問：馬國明、洛楓）及讀者網上投票，選出一本以香港為主題的好書，結果將於書展開幕當日公布並進行頒獎。請立即進入 投票區

中港台三地書癡大會︰香港二手書店之旅、書癡夜話、民間善本藏書展：近年在中國內地，古籍善本和民國時期圖書的收藏、鑑賞以至拍賣等等活動方興未艾，而收藏珍貴舊書亦向來是讀書人的愛好，有見於此，本屆牛棚書展推出重點節目：邀請中、港、台三地「書癡」，包括林冠中、傅月庵、謝其章、吳興文、陳智德，聯同讀者作一次香港二手書店之旅，在書展期間舉行「書癡夜話」，交流藏書和讀書心得，並舉辦民間善本藏書展，徵集民間珍藏善本，在書展期間設導賞員向觀眾介紹。

「香港土著與世界公民」講座︰「古跡‧社區‧環保──香港歷史與香港人的身份重塑」、「本地保育運動──城市發展與本地公民社會的興起」：近年舊區重建與發展衍生怎樣的問題？社區保育是什麼概念，如何與香港的文化發展連繫？香港如何與世界文化接軌？香港會否被邊緣化？廿一世紀的香港將向何處去？書展期間將舉辦一系列講座，邀請學者專家發表意見，與觀眾一起討論。講員包括：馬傑偉、梁款、羅永生、鄭敏華、許日銓、金佩瑋、龔立人、陳雲、呂大樂、張炳玲、沈旭暉、陳家洛、張翠容。

駐場藝術家@牛棚書展：多位本地藝術家，包括盧燕珊、黃志輝、蔡仞姿、魂游、虱仔同學會、香港作動，為本年「書就是書」主題，度身裝置展覽、演出，讓大家在浸淫書海之餘，提供另類創作啟發空間。

其他節目包括：「書就是書」小型書展、馬拉松讀書會、詩音樂會、造書工作坊、書簽工作坊、市民自由書墟及創意地攤。
還有閉幕音樂會，由維港唱片旗下歌手傾力演出，為書展劃上完美句號。