www.tank.tv
Ken Jacobs
Curated by Mark Webber
1st October - 30th November 2008

Ken Jacobs (b.1933) has been active as a filmmaker, performer and teacher for the past five decades. Rigorous and dedicated, his work is characterised by a keen eye for formal composition and a fierce political consciousness.

As a central figure of the generation that defined independent filmmaking during the post-War era, Jacobs contributed to the liberation of cinema from technical and ideological conventions. Beginning in the 1950s, he developed an ‘urban guerrilla cinema’ out of poverty and desperation, shooting improvised routines on city streets. The early works ‘Star Spangled to Death’, ‘Little Stabs at Happiness’ and ‘Blonde Cobra’ feature a nascent Jack Smith, years before the renegade artist produced his own films.

Having lived in New York all his life, the changing character of t he city has been a strong presence throughout Jacobs’ work, from his manipulation of vintage street scenes in ‘New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903′, through to the diaristic video ‘Circling Zero: We See Absence’, which observes the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, a few blocks away from Jacobs’ home. ‘The Sky Socialist’ was shot in a deserted neighbourhood (long since decommissioned) below the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1960s, and ‘Perfect Film’ uses raw television news reports on the assassination of Malcolm X.

Found or archival footage is a source for much of Jacobs’ work. In ‘Star Spangled to Death’, entire appropriated films contribute to an accumulative denunciation of American politics, religion, war and racism, whereas an analytical approach to reclaiming cinema’s past was originated in ‘Tom, Tom the Pipers’ Son’ by re-filming selected details of a theatrical production dating from 1905. This same footage has lately been digitally excavated in ‘Return to the Scene of the Crime’.

The technique of unlocking aspects of film material that would otherwise pass unnoticed is the essence of the live Nervous System pieces that Jacobs has performed with two adapted projectors since the mid-1970s. Repetition and pulsing flicker teases frozen images into impossible depth and perpetual motion (demonstrated in New York Street Trolleys 1900), a process further developed by the Eternalism system of editing used in many recent videos. The previously ephemeral live performances ‘Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy; Bye Molly! ‘ and ‘Two Wrenching Departures’ are amongst the works that take on new life in their digital form.

A contemporary of Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner and Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs is one of the true innovators of the moving image, who continues his radical practice in the present. Though his images frequently depict bygone eras, the works are resolutely contemporary, displaying a vitality and ingenuity that is rarely matched.

The exhibition at tank.tv presents a portfolio of 20 works covering 50 years of Ken Jacobs’ artistic production from 1957 to the present day.
Curated by Mark Webber.

Ask Ken!
For the duration of the online show, tank.tv offers a unique opportunity for discussion with Ken Jacobs in an extended Q+A session. Email your questions to the artist at ken@tank.tv. A regularly updated transcript of the dialogue will be online at www.tank.tv/askken

Events
See www.tank.tv for a range of events being held in conjunction with the tank.tv exhibition.

What’s Free Culture?

Students for Free Culture (SFC) is a diverse, non-partisan group of students and young people who are working to get their peers involved in the technology policy, copyright reform, remix culture, and open access. Launched in April 2004 at Swarthmore College, SFC has helped establish student groups at colleges and universities across the United States. Today, SFC chapters exist at over 30 colleges, from Maine to California, with many more getting started around the world.

Free Culture Conference 2008

While SFC has held small, regional conferences before, this is the first we’ve done on a large scale with a real budget. We’ve raised over $10,000 to help fly out students, activists, and free culture community members for Columbus day weekend to help strengthen and grow our movement. Day 1 is intended to give a thorough introduction to the players and issues in our movement—anyone interested in politics, tech policy, art, and culture will find something to like. Groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons will be on hand with information on how to get involved in reform efforts. Day 2 is designed to help students learn the key components of activism through workshops and an un-conference setting.

We’ll have a slate of fascinating panels—Politics and Transparency, Access to Essential Medicines, Remix Culture, and others—and keynotes by Lawrence Lessig and Mozilla CEO John Lilly. There’s a little something for everyone—including an introduction to the Berkeley Art Museum’s OpenMuseum initiative presented by digital curator Richard Rinehart. Register today at conference.freeculture.org

This years conference is an experiment. Instead of charging event admission, were asking attendees to pay what they think the value of admission is worth. Whether you give $1 or $100 is up to you. The proceeds will go towards conference expenses and further development of the Free Culture movement.

Want more details? Want to get involved? Check the conference wiki.

Details

Conference—October 11th, 2008
10 AM—7 PM
Chevron Auditorium, International House
2299 Piedmont Ave
Berkeley, CA 94720
Google map

Workshops—October 12th, 2008

Details TBA

This simple online game comes from the Spanish collective, exgae. The game purports to be an “experiment of procedural rhetorics”, “The goal is to provide a simplified interactive rendition of theories and propositions about knowledge capitalism (es. Negri, Lessing, Wark). It’s a game you cannot lose. Even if you stop playing the game always tend to a dynamic equilibrium between market and Common. The basic assumption is that there will never be a complete privatization of shared knowledge and without a strong opposition (represented by the player’s action) the forces of the market will indefinitely exploit the innovative ideas emerging from the society.”

It feels a little like PacMan as designed by CreativeCommons, and in some ways seems more like a rhetorical slide show than game where the interactions cause unexpected outcomes, but nonetheless a fun experiment. What might have made this game truly amazing is if it were an interface to an actual aggregation of content, such that each yellow globule, instead of representing an abstract bit of “content”, represented a real essay or mp3 file that was either freed into a Creative Commons zone like ccMixter - OR - shunted away into RIAA hell, based on whether or not the player was successful in saving it.

The Free Culture Game can be played online at:
http://www.molleindustria.org/freeculturegame-eng

Digital Fringe 08 Call for submissions

*Digital Fringe* is now accepting entries (video, stills or audio). Entries accepted all year round but cut-off for this year’s screening is Friday 19th September 2008.

Ferret around your hard drives, dig out those gems and have your work
seen on hundreds of public screens.

Uploaded content will play on an extensive network of screens around the
world: from retail television display walls to huge urban screens,
hospitality venues, galleries, libraries and many other public nooks and
crannys.

Visit www.digitalfringe.com.au to submit your works, and for more
festival info.

Artist retain full copyright of their works and have the option of
utilising the Creative Commons licensing scheme.

Digital Fringe is produced by *Horse Bazaar* as part of the Melbourne
Fringe Festival (September 24 - October 12

=============================
Digital Fringe 08 Screen call out

The Digital Fringe festival is seeking all sorts of Screens!

Do you have a screen, projector, TV or old computer monitor that you would like to play free digital art on?

Digital Fringe is seeking all sorts of public screening venues to
participate in 2008 - galleries, shopping centres, bars, cafes, pubs, retail venues, libraries and large public screens are all taking part.

Help us to bring cutting edge digital artworks by local and international artists to the Victorian general public.

No screen is too large or small - it may be in a back corner of a
library on a computer monitor, part of a shop’s window display, a wall of TV’s in JB Hifi, a projector in a foyer, or a huge public screen. We simply want to get this artistic content into as many nooks and crannies of public space as possible.

As part of The Age 2008 Melbourne Fringe Festival, Digital Fringe will
be broadcasting a curated playlist of digital art on public screens across Victoria. This playlist - the General Stream - consists of digital artwork that is submitted from around the world in response to a massive public callout. It is an eclectic mix of quality screen based digital art including animations, video, short film and stills. All artworks are G rated and do not required audio.

Screen Venues that sign up to broadcast Digital Fringe entries can play
the content whenever they like during the festival (24 September - 12 October). Screening can be continuous, event focused, fitted in around
your normal programming, or be used if your screen has downtime where
nothing is playing.

All locations taking part in broadcasting the Digital Fringe General
Stream will be promoted on the Digital Fringe website, which will feature a list of screening venues with links to partner websites and provision for logo placement, as well as be featured on a Google Map of Digital Fringe Screen locations. Last year we had over 40,000 visits to the Digital Fringe website, and the main Fringe website had 76,000 visits during the 17 days of the festival. We hope to double that this year! Screens locations may also feature in press releases.

Any screen playing Digital Fringe artworks during the festival will be
helping to support artists and the promotion of digital art in local communities across Victoria. Not to mention providing free entertainment to punters, customers, and your wider community.

To register your interest, or for more information on how you can get
involved contact people@digitalfringe.com.au

Check out www.digitalfringe.com.au for more festival information & for example art works

This summer at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, Still Water’s John Bell and Jon Ippolito demo’d two networks designed to help more people access and contribute to academic research and development. The Pool focuses on the creative process, stimulating and documenting collaborations among artists and programmers. (Rick Rinehart at UC-Berkeley was an early adopter.) ThoughtMesh, meanwhile, focuses more on sharing the products of academic research; its auto-generated tags connect essays on similar themes drawn from different sites across the Web. As an upcoming feature in Leonardo magazine argues, such “crowdsourcing” networks may change the way creative and scholarly research is recognized by universities across the world.

The Berkman Web site features a video of the talk and this description:

The Internet both attracts and repels art institutions. Curators wonder who could possibly ensure quality control in a world where 50,000 videos are added to YouTube each day. Fortunately, artists themselves were crowdsourcing long before the Internet: composer John Cage laid out the principles fourteen years before Richard Stallman founded the Gnu project and twenty-nine years before the term ‘open source’ was coined. In addition to collaborating on their own creative projects, artists have helped to build the very recognition networks necessary to find the Leonardos among the LOLcats. This month saw the public release of two social networks, The Pool and ThoughtMesh, designed to help collaborators and critics find and evaluate each other. Unlike existing publishing systems such as blogs and wikis, these networks aim to give ordinary users a ‘big picture’ as well, and include graphical and lexical tools that can help answer such questions as how networked creativity is enhanced or hurt by licensing choices, the number of contributors, and project lifespan.

The Berkman Center presentation followed on the heels of the May 30 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education showcasing The Pool, ThoughtMesh, and John Bell’s Re:Poste distributed review network as potential mechanisms for discovering and appraising academic work. Adding to the evidence that a sea-change may be brewing for how higher education evaluates its researchers, MIT’s Leonardo magazine of art and technology will be publishing the official promotion and tenure criteria of the U-Me New Media Department in early 2009. The magazine will publish these criteria along with a white paper entitled “New Criteria for New Media,” which argues for the redefinition of traditional criteria for excellence in the age of networked scholarship.

Written by U-Me faculty Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito, and Owen Smith in collaboration with Steve Evans and Nate Stormer, the criteria and white paper underscore the potential of crowdsourcing networks such as The Pool and ThoughtMesh to provide alternative evaluation mechanisms for academics:

Peer-evaluated online communities may invent their own measures of member evaluation, in which case they may be relevant to a researcher who participates in those communities. Examples of such self-policing communities include Slashdot, The Pool, Open Theory, and the Distributed Learning Project. The MLA pins the responsibility for learning these new metrics on reviewers rather than the reviewed.[17] Given the mutability of such metrics, however, promotion and tenure candidates may be called upon to explain and give context to these metrics for their reviewers.

As if to reinforce the conclusions of the white paper, ThoughtMesh co-developers Craig Dietrich and John Bell have just launched a commenting system internal to the ThoughtMesh network with the provocative heading of “peer review.” Unlike the relatively uncontrolled comments at a site like YouTube, however, ThoughtMesh’s reviews are subject to a rigorous trust metric. Each reviewer must claim a level of expertise before rating an article, and the software holds them accountable in a way that goes beyond even the rigorous method of peer reviewers for academic journals.

As might be expected, a review by someone claiming expertise will have more effect on the overall rating of the essay than by someone who claims none. However, those who claim expertise have to live up to it. If an academic makes exaggerated claims and is then trashed by her peers, her credibility will plummet *faster* than if she claimed no expertise in the first place.

The Pool and ThoughtMesh are free and open to anyone to try. For more information, please contact John Bell, Craig Dietrich, or Jon Ippolito.
(ThoughtMesh was built by Craig Dietrich and Jon Ippolito with John Bell; The Pool was conceived by Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito, and Owen Smith and built by John Bell with Matt James, Jeremy Knope, Justin Russell, and Mike Scott.)

www.tank.tv at Tate Modern
19th - 21st September 2008

tank.tv has the pleasure of holding a weekend of screenings from its 2008 Guest Curators Programme in Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium. www.tank.tv invited some of the world’s foremost curators of artist’s film and video to create exhibitions exclusively for its online platform. Four of these shows have been re-thought and re-constructed specifically for screening at Tate Modern.

Join us after the screenings for wonderful cakes kindly provided by Patisserie Valerie and drinks generously supplied by Kirin and Firefly.

Tickets are on sale now and available to book via Tate’s website:
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/film/15464.htm

Ken Jacobs, Return to the Scene of the Crime.
Friday 19 September 2008, 19.00
In a contemporary riff on one of his landmark works, the influential experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs uses new technology to both interrogate and arouse a theatrical tableau, shot in 1905, based on Hogarth’s Southwark Fair. The antique film print is probed, exploded and reconstituted in the digital domain with radical ingenuity and infectious wit. This extraordinary new work teaches us how to see.

The Young and Evil, Curated by Stuart Comer.
Saturday 20 September 2008, 19.00
Reconsidering the historical contours and shifting relationships of sex and community in the digital age, a range of artists has been invited to select two works: one contemporary video shown to be shown online, and one historical film to be screened in the cinema. Selectors include AA Bronson, Drew Daniel, William E Jones, Daria Martin, Carlos Motta, Henrik Olesen, Karol Radziszewski, Emily Roysdon, Bruce Yonemoto and Akram Zaatari.

She doesn’t think so but she’s dressed for the h-bomb, curated by Negar Azimi.
Sunday 21 September 2008, 15.00
‘She doesn’t think so but she’s dressed for the h-bomb’ explores the weight of diverse histories in defining the current moment - whether manifest in the form of national myth, ritual, architecture or pop culture. Works by: Ziad Antar, Shahryrar Nashat, Rosalind Nashashibi, Yael Bartana, Iman Issa, Hassan Khan, The Atlas Group, Ahmet Ogut and Haris Epaminonda.

The Whole World, Curated by Ian White
Sunday 21 September 2008, 17.00
Online The Whole World is an ongoing open archive to which anyone can contribute - an uncensored list of lists inaugurated by considering it as a formal and political device. Originally selected and submitted works are reorganized and augmented into this single programme including works by Claude Chuzel, Hollis Frampton, Dalia Neis, Uriel Orlow, Michael Robinson and Valerie Tevere.

Artificial intelligence methods open up new possibilities in game design, enabling the creation of believable characters with rich personalities and emotions, interactive story systems that incorporate player interaction into the construction of dynamic plots, and authoring systems that assist human designers in creating games. Games are fast becoming a major medium of the 21st century, being used for everything from education, to editorial news commentary, to expressing public policy and political opinions. Game AI research can radically expand the expressiveness of games, supporting them in becoming a mainstream medium for societal discourse. These ideas will be illustrated by looking at two projects: the interactive drama Façade (released July 2005, downloadable from www.interactivestory.net) and current work on automated game design support. See the Event link to right for more info on this event…..

With the National Conventions just around the corner, it might be time to take a trip down memory lane… In 1972, San Francisco-based radical television collective TVTV (Top Value Television) made Four More Years, the first independently produced videotape ever broadcast on television. TVTV’s coverage of the Nixon nomination is a groundbreaking challenge to commercially produced news: rather than watching the scripted, variety-show nomination spectacle, the TVTV reporters trawl the convention floor with their lightweight Porta Pak cameras. They get candid interviews with celebrity newsmen Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite, follow protesters on their pickets, get up close with Tricia Nixon, and are nearly thrown out of the convention. The entire documentary is on Media Burn, an exceptional web-archive of radical video from the early days of public access television.

http://mediaburn.org/Video-Preview.128.0.html?&aaa=12&flagg=2&uid=4414

The National Poetry Foundation is now the first organization to found its own Mesh:

Over forty authors from the National Poetry Foundation’s conference on poetry of the seventies have published their work using a new Still Water tool that reveals connections among different peoples’ writing. Who knew that “1973” and “John Ashbery” were on so many poets’ minds? ThoughtMesh did.

A Mesh is a subset of articles linked using ThoughtMesh software; each Mesh is controlled by an individual or collective organization, and is typically devoted to a particular topic.

A tag cloud on the NPF Mesh home reveals the most common tags across all the texts contributed by its members. Some are no surprise–”poetics” and “modernism,” for example–while others, such as “1973,” “John Ashbery,” and “erotic,” suggest themes for poets in the seventies that might not otherwise have been evident.

Since the NPF took the plunge, other organizations have created their own Meshes, including the University of Cambridge and the University of Maine. It’s easy to do, and helps anyone who wants to start an online journal or document a conference by interlinking papers published on the same or different Web sites.

So, who wants to start a Berkeley New Media Mesh?

jon

As you may know, we’ve been running an algorithmically timed 0n0n0n conference series on New Media since 01/01/01, and 08/08/08 is upon us. This time we’re stripping the conference down to the T-Shirt!

Well, we are also seeking your registration and your input in our online conference topic discussion. The conference theme is 080808 True Colors What we are talking about is the standard digital color format of 24-bit color. In this format, each one of 24 bits (0 or 1, true or false) describes how computer displays should mix light to achieve a specific color. We will focus in on this process with our website (designed by Nick Reid), which allows you to change individual bits of the color format to see colors change.

When you register (fee $30.00), you can reserve a bit, set the bit to either 0 or 1, and then explain your choice. You can also review other participants’ explanations of their choices. This, we hope, will produce a conversation online about color, something and nothingness, truth and falsehood. It will also determine a palette of four colors which will define the custom-designed and custom sewn conference t-shirt (hence the fee). The conference t-shirt will be shipped to all participants after the conference closes.

All this is happening here:

http://studio.berkeley.edu/080808

It would be great to see your comments up there, and you will get a unique T-Shirt from the process, which starts today, and ends on Friday August 8 at 8 PM!