saw “Let the right one in” – classy vampire flick from Sweden – check it out…

testing, testing

Catching up with byte-time projects

6 November 2008

dorkbot cbr exhibition – CCAS Manuka

The inaugural dorkbot cbr group show opens Thursday November 6th at Canberra Contemporary Artspace Manuka. It’s a diverse lineup that reflects the mix of skills and talents in the group, with the work including wearables, data art, solar power, generative grunge, drawing machines and audiovisuals. This is the first showing of my new Fauxonomy project with a work titled Estuarine flows. You can see documentation of my work at http://www.flickr.com/bytetime. Also, go here to view Press release.

5 August 2008

Tracey recently presented some of her work at ISEA2008 in Singapore, here is the abstract.

4 January 2008

Dorkbot hits Canberra! This was recently published in Art Monthy:

Dorks ahoy!

Following its fifth monthly meeting, Dorkbot Canberra might consider itself well and truly established. The initiative of dynamic duo Alexandra Gillespie and Tracey Meziane Benson, Dorkbot is one chapter of an increasing number of loose international affiliates consisting of ‘people doing strange things with electricity’. From London to Barcelona and New York, Bangalore to Brisbane, ‘dorks’ are talking about all things conceptual and technical. Meetings are generally held in the last week of every month in the Fireside Room or CCAS Gallery at Gorman House Arts Centre, and they provide a forum for information and discussion. The Canberra sessions have had scintillating talks from Ben Lippmeier, Benjamin Forster, David Broker and Mitchell Whitelaw. Keep an eye on this space for the Dorkbot exhibition later in the year. For information about dorkbot go to www.dorkbot.org. For Canberra based dorkbot meetings and events go to the dorkbot cbr blog, or www.ccas.com.au/

28 December 2007

Swipezone has just been included as part of the Web Beiennial 07.

11 November 2007

I am looking for contributions to participate in an ongoing web based project I am putting together titled ‘fb friends – fb fictions’.

The web site will be a mindmap of facebook users, incorporating links, text and images that the users contribute.

If you would like to participate, please email me a 250 x 250px sized image (jpg or gif) that you would like as your profile image, links to websites, text, image, animation or other work that you would like featured. Also, please encourage people in your networks to join in – it will make for a much more interesting tapestry of work.

Could you please email materials to tracey at byte dash time dot net.

Please watch for updates on ‘facebook fictions‘ and check the mindmap picture.

2 June 2007

The new media festival and conference, BOOM! Taiwan-Australia New Media Arts Forum featured work from Swipezone. Meziane was also selected to participate as part of the ANU delegation, but had to withdraw because of family committments.
Exhibition venue: Taipei National University of Arts

Bastard Culture. User participation and the extension of cultural industries

Bastard Culture. User participation and the extension of cultural industries

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Digital Culture hacking Participation

The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as
enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into
producers. The unfolding online cultural production by users has been
framed enthusiastically as participatory culture. But while many studies
of user activities and the use of the Internet tend to romanticize
emerging media practices, Mirko Tobias Schäfer steps beyond the usual
framework and analyzes user participation in the context of accompanying
popular and scholarly discourse, as well as the material aspects of
design, and their relation to the practices of design and appropriation.
Schäfer argues that participatory culture is rather a dynamic
interaction of users and companies, discourses and technologies. The
availability of computers and Internet expand the traditional culture
industry into the domain of users, who actively participate in cultural
production, either by appropriating products from the commercial domain
or by creating their owns. But while user activities constitute a
significant loss of control for certain sectors of traditional media
industries, especially in the area of distribution, the larger culture
industry benefits from user driven innovation through the appropriation
of corporate design. Furthermore, the media industry undergoes a shift
from creating content to providing platforms for user driven social
interactions and user-generated content. In this extended culture
industry participation unfolds not only in the cocreation of media
content and software-based products, but also in the development and
defense of distinctive media practices that represent a sociopolitical
understanding of new technologies.

Maroussia Lévesque and Passage Oublié

Elaborate.ca is a very interesting blog by Canadian artist and reseacher Maroussia Lévesque. I came across her work when we on the ‘Borders and Crossings’ panel together at ISEA 2008.

Her paper was about the politics of border crossing in the age of mobility. See abstract. Looking at the spectrum of mobility, from the voluntary movement of an elite bypassing border checks to the forced mobility of illegally rendered terror suspects, Lévesque explained the notion of differential mobility. This rift between voluntary and forced mobility is the backdrop for Passage Oublié, a new media installation created by her and other members of the Obx research lab.

Lévesque holds a BA in Computation arts from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada and is the conceptual lead at Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media. http://www.elaborate.ca/

Transmission Lines 1955 – 1974

Transmission Lines 1955 – 1974 is a project by Linda Carroli. It documents her father’s working life as a rigger and linesman with the Electric Power Transmission and its Italian parent company. He kept a photographic record of his working life and the photographs featured in this map are his personal photographs from various transmission line projects around Australia and Italy in the period 1955 to 1974. However, he commenced work in Italy in 1954 and remained working with EPT until 1975.

The Blender Institute

The Blender Institute in Amsterdam is a not-for-profit studio for open source 3D projects. Sounds exciting eh!

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange’s “Elephants Dream”, the Blender Foundation initiated another open movie project. Again a small team (7) of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community have been invited to come together to work in Amsterdam from October 2007 until April 2008 on completing a short 3D animation movie. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period.

The creative concept of “Peach” was completely different as for “Orange”. This time it is “funny and furry”!

The Blender Foundation and Blender community have been the main financiers for Peach. As for the previous open movie, a pre-sale campaign to purchase the DVD set in advance will be organized.

Additional support from sponsors and subsidy funds has been realized as well.

Peach also was the first Open Project hosted by the new Blender Institute in Amsterdam. This will make the project more independent, without much involvement of production partners, and also will ensure continuity.

Their recent production Big Buck Bunny has gone live on youtube and you can check it out here…

_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_

_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ explores concepts that shape and are shaped by an extensive range of online/synthetic encounters. These concepts are formed through principles generated internally within specific online environments. These environments include – among others – Massively Multiplayer Online Environments [World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Second Life], Social Networking Platforms [Twitter, Facebook, OpenSocial, Friendfeed], Social Gaming [Passively Multiplayer Online Game, Parallel Kingdom] and Alternate Reality Games [I Love Bees, Perplex_City, Year Zero]. Entries will dissect post-geophysically defined notions of reality through a mixture of:

* Platform-specific case studies.
* Analysis of contextual behaviour sets.
* Construction of theoretical projections derived via synthetic, mixed and augmented formats.

Check it out at: http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/

DR. STEVEN KURTZ CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES!

After four long years, finally some relief for Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) artist Steve Kurtz regarding his legal battle. In February 2006, I moderated a discussion with members of the CAE Defense Fund and the CAE This is a recent post from the CAE Defense Fund web site:

Department of Justice Fails to Appeal Dismissal
Kurtz Speaks about Four-Year Ordeal

Steve Kurtz still needs your support. Our next step will be to get back his art projects, research materials and personal belongings taken by the FBI in 2004. Please join our low-frequency email list so you will be informed of any important updates and Action Alerts.

THANK YOU FROM STEVE KURTZ

del.icio.us + MindMap

This is cool! It has been around for a while, but as I am new to Freemind this is a novelty. Delicious Mind puts your del.icio.us bookmarks into a mind map format.