The Science and Technology Studies (STS) Center at European University at St. Petersburg, Russia is announcing a call for participation in a series of three international collaborative summer schools. The first school will take place at European University at St. Petersburg. The second school will be held by Sciences Po Medialab in Paris. The third will take place in a university in New York City (final place will be announced later).

The 2016 summer school will combine lectures by participating faculty and a practical hands-on lab directed by Lev Manovich, professor of Computer Science at the City University of New York, and Damiano Cerrone, Principal Researcher at Michael Sorkin’s TERREFORM CAUR in New York and Associate of the Spatial Ethnography Lab.

This workshop explores the landscape of the invisible city, using digital traces to unveil, measure and study the meta-morphology of the city. Participants will a use large dataset of location-based social media from Instagram and open source GIS software. They will also physically observe selected locations and compare their findings with the patterns revealed by analysis of Instagram images. In particular we will study the relation between urban amenities – such as retail, food establishments, and other services – and the image of place to gain a new understanding of the invisible relations between social practices and urban space.

The cities of St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York share many commonalities: they have a strong cultural presence, draw large tourist populations, host some of the greatest museums, restaurants, music and theater venues in the world, and are considered both iconic and atypical in their respective countries. They also create unique practices, interactions, subcultures, and spatial logics that are not always visible to the naked eye. Combining the use of computational methods and qualitative social science research, the series of summer schools will investigate the digital traces of human activities in their respective host cities.

Participants will learn the basics of digital mapping and analysis using open source and social media data. The main dataset used in the lab is over 400,000 Instagram images shared in St. Petersburg during 07/2014 – 06/2015.

Application deadline: June 1, 2016. More information on application http://euspopenday.tilda.ws/page159192.html

A new series of workshops for children exploring experimental music start on May 14, 2016 at Chats Palace Arts Centre in London. Using a wide variety of analogue and digital equipment their activities include sculpting sounds using small modular synthesizers, composing original experimental sound art, circuit bending, field recording, coding and programming, building cardboard record players, conducting orchestras of fruit and vegetables, creating and recording Foley sounds, preparing pianos, sound walks, learning about acoustic ecology plus more.

The children will work towards a performance at Chats Palace on the 9th July where they will showcase the work created, but if a child doesn’t want to take part in the showcase that’s also absolutely fine.

The School of Noise runs workshops for young people and adults encouraging the exploration of noise, sound and music. Their aim is to provide creative and imaginative activities using sound in accessible, fun and educational ways.

In the last week of May 2016, the legendary Funkhaus in Berlin will turn into a giant creative laboratory – a labyrinth of rooms and corridors filled with curious experiments that fuse musical performance and cutting edge technologies. MusicTechFest, a giant creative laboratory and global festival of music ideas, will once again bring the entire music technology ecosystem together under one roof: artists and scientists; academia and industry; makers, inventors, performers, composers and visionaries, everyone to create strange machines, amazing mixtures, incredible experiences and transhuman wonders. With experiments in mindreading controllers, interactive performances, microbiology synthesisers, bionic extensions and junkyard robotics – the laboratory of #MTFBerlin will become a place to explore, discover, and get involved.

Yes, between May 23 and May 30, 2016 you will get the chance to work with some of the greatest artists, developers, innovators and designers, to build performances for the main stage. You will get to improvise and jam, compose, make, collaborate and hack. At the MusicTechFest everyone operates on the same plane, including some of the legends of electronic music.

Get tickets at http://www.ticketbase.com/events/mtfberlin. MusicTechFest events are also streamed live online, and videos of individual presentations are made available on YouTube.

Soundtoys.net is a web space to exhibit exciting new works by audio-visual artists. The site is a meeting point for growing community of artists and general audience. In addition to the exhibition of audio-visual projects, the site contains areas for artists interviews, links to resources, and texts by contributing writers about interactive arts, audio-visual synthesis, generative art, and a history of interactivity.

Soundtoys API provides open tools for artists and developers to interact with our content. You can write your own interfaces to the work, re-curate the works and reference the work in many different ways. Soundtoys collection is always open for new submissions of interactive, audio-visual art. If you would like to contribute some of your work, please follow this link.

Digital Pragmata is a digital arts and humanities initiative at Virginia Commonwealth University. Its goal is to bring together scholars, students, creators, and everyone interested in seeing the digital arts and humanities flourish, whether in the classroom, the studio, or research. The initiative is run by VCU Libraries in partnership with the Office of Research and Innovation.

Digital pragmata flourish at the nexus of research, teaching, and creativity. They can be textual databases, creative visualizations of information, multimedia explorations, collaboratively annotated maps, and a thousand other projects. How do they fit into a world built on books and scholarly journals? Will these new ways of communicating displace a world made on paper, or will they blend into new forms of scholarly expression that grow from the best of the past? What is truly novel and significant about recent developments in the digital humanities and what are the implications for the humanities in general?

Read more and join the discussion at the Digital Pragmata blog.

Every two years, the Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau (TMA) and their partners write out the international CYNETART Competition. The historically important Festspielhaus HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts, Dresden offers the CYNETART international festival for computer based art an extraordinary venue for public presentations and the performance of inter- and trans-disciplinary media art investigations.

You’re invited to propose your installation, sculpture and performance projects, expanded media works, AV concerts or net art projects. All award-winning works will be presented in the exhibition of CYNETART Festival. An international jury selects the project submissions for the award of the CYNETART Competition.

2016 marks the 20th anniversary of the CYNETART international festival for computer based art in November 10th – 16th is held at its main venue HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts, Dresden and many satellite venues around the city. 20 years of CYNETART festival is the reflection of the zeitgeist, the presentation of artistic quality and an invitation to the audience to discover something new.

Concept for CYNETART 2016 explores what is the unique substance and justification of the term new media art. The discourse of the creative industry today will be obsolete tomorrow. Hence, artists working with new technology are presented with a recurrent dilemma. Ever progressing, this technology is a tremendous area to explore but could be a form of entrapment as well. Seemingly compelling at its time of premiere, many of these types of works may outlive their temporary quality as obsolete as their accompanying discourses. One way to address these aesthetic dilemmas is to explore technology addressing and breaking its core: its inherent boundaries, instead of promoting the promise or more common expectations of the industry. Craft is as essential as intuition, and it is this embodied process that leads to uncanny work.

The focus for this year’s theme wishes to extend our ambitions beyond just visualizing the “new knowing” or responding to topical subjects. It is a common misunderstanding to assume that a work of art is already relevant just because its topic is. A creation is not already art because it is “interesting” and art it is not harmless. As CYNETART jury states, art with new media is – like every form of art – about Enigma not about NVIDIA.

More details on how to submit your enigmatic work at CYNET 2016 Call for Entries page. Deadline is May 1, 2016.

Interaction Design, Human Computer Interaction, Smart Materials, Emotional Machines, Interactive Interfaces, Interactive Cinema, Digital Design or Art and Robotics will meet at Technarte Bilbao 2016 on May 19 & 20, 2016.

Technarte is a conference where international artists and technologists show the most innovative artistic disciplines that use the technology as means of creation. This union between Art and Technology generates new reconnaissance fields, like Nano-art, 3D Printing, interactive installations, Art & Robotics, Bio-art, immersive 3D development, Mobile Art, smart materials and hyper-augmented reality, among others.

The main goal of Technarte is to present the technological developments which facilitate the full expression of the modern art, and to be a forum of discussion and reflection around the existent convergence between art and technology. The cutting-edge technological innovations provide infinitive possibilities for the artist, and the technological society uses the creativity of the artists as a way of inspiration for new technological projects.

Learn more about Technarte Bilbao 2016 program and speakers.