Reminder:

070707
UpStage Festival
call for participation
a festival of live online performances to celebrate the launch of UpStage 2

You are warmly invited to create your own original cyberformance and perform it to a global audience on 7 July 2007, using UpStage - http://www.upstage.org.nz .

Purpose-built for live interactive performance events, UpStage is easy and fun to use. It works via a web browser so you don't need to download or install anything to create or attend a performance. The UpStage team can help you to learn how to use the software and give advice on devising work in UpStage and creating graphics.

Date : Thu Mar 22nd 10am-1pm
Event : The Public Space is not Common Place - Performing the Archive
With : Snifflin' Elanor Bonny, Cowerin' Norm Smithe, Bloody Mary Rackham, Marylin the Back-Stabber, Smugglin' Lucy Smithe

The Greatest Chapter of Art History in the World.
Goldsmiths, MA Contemporary Art Theory, Critical Encounter Lab Group 3: "Yokoonoesque"

You are invited to attend a special presentation screening of the Bristol Bronx young peoples A/V collaboration at the Watershed on Wednesday evening 21st March at 7pm.

There will be a live video conference with the facilitators in New York and some of the young people involved will talk about their experiences whilst mixing audio visuals from their performances live on the internet. This will include audio and visuals from the Bruce Grove, London workshops which were held in tandem and provided an exchange for young people in both groups.

Online real-time event : Bruce Grove Mix
When?: Fri Feb 23rd 3pm-4pm GMT
With : Fizzykal, Traye, Seyoum, Prince, Blazem, Hazeldon, Kkid, Kidhypez, Yoseph, Shazey, Szpako and Grazmaster

A group of talented young people from Tottenham in North London have been preparing media files that explore and depict life in their local neighbourhood. Their mix has been prepared with the support of two artists, Graziano Milano and Michael Szpakowski and will be projected live during the launch of the new Bruce Grove Media Centre, London N17.

Furthernoise.org has teamed up with The Basement Studio, Bristol and The Point youth centre in the New York Bronx to run a series of workshops in realtime internet audio visual mixing. Over 4 weekends 10 young people aged 16 - 20 in both cities are meeting through a web site interface called VisitorsStudio and working together in groups to develop an audio visual performance or DJ/VJ mix that will be simultaneously screened live to audiences in both cities. The workshops are being held at the Basement Studio, Bristol on Saturdays 10th, 17th, 24th of February & 3rd of March from 2 - 6.30 pm and the final mixes will be screened at Watershed Media Centre on Wednesday 21st March.

Remix Theory an online resource by Eduardo Navas, is featuring A CONTEXT MAP OF VisitorsStudio, by Ruth Catlow & myself. An article that we both collaboratively wrote, putting forward a clearer perspective & context, in regard to where it sits within the thriving territory of real-time art, software art, net art and participative and collaborative expression in contemporary ‘remix culture’..

Last week Graziano Milano led our first training day at HTTP Gallery for media artists interested in working with young people and digital media. We also demonstrated VisitorsStudio.

Especially enjoyable was the process of sharing stories and memories with other participants as a way of identifying some common vivid images and themes that we could then work on together. Finding satisfying ways to work together still remains the most difficult thing in VisitorsStudio - how diverse groups of individuals can identify and commit to participatory processes and it not just feel like going through the motions... or a fight for individuals to get their voices heard. The fear is that the process will end up something like what is sometimes described as 'designing by committee'.

The Seminar by the Sea for Female Artists, Writers and Curators

Hen Weekend is a new format networking event set-up by artist Ellie Harrison. It aims to facilitate discussion and encourage collaboration between its participants - who (at each event) will be a mix of 16 high-profile and emerging artists from around the UK and abroad.

We all know what tag clouds are, usually text of varying sizes indicating importance and frequence of said idea. Wikipedia (the ever trusty resource) notes that tag clouds were first used by flickr (yay web 2.0) and:

can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.

Just have a look at flickr's "all time most popular tags."

However, I wonder if tagging today has evolved into something more than just words. Does tagging have links with the way people tag and how they represent knowledge?

Recently I read about tagging people (not sure I would want to see tags people associate with me!), a del.icio.us for people. Melanie Swann has an interesting approach to this next generation of tagging here. According to Melanie, tagging people would include "tagging people with words; annotating their interest areas, likes and dislikes, how you know them, where you met them and probably many other aspects of meta data." Hrm...good idea but only if you can edit the tags!

This photo was posted on the ACTION YOUTH blog by ACTION youth in the Bronx, New York, USA, who are participating in a live audiovisual mixing project with young people in Bristol. The project is run by Roger from Furthernoise.org, in February.

Roger's the one in the middle with the blue shirt on.

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