CYLAND MediaArtLab is happy to announce its partnership with the Lumen Prize, a project dedicated to building a movement around digital art. As a not-for-profit social enterprise their goal is to focus the world’s attention on this exciting genre through an annual competition, a global tour and associated activities including workshops, seminars and special events.

The Lumen Prize celebrates the very best art created digitally. Since their first show in London’s Cork Street in January 2013, Lumen has staged nearly 30 shows and events around the world, including New York City, Shanghai, Athens, Amsterdam, Riga, Cardiff, Hong Kong, Leeds and London. In collaboration with its academic partners, Lumen advances the understanding of digital art at seminars, artist talks, workshops and symposiums.

It is with great honour that we see this partnership as possibility to foster innovation for digital art.

If you are interested in learning more about Lumen Projects please visit http://lumenprize.com/

FutureEverything is delighted to announce the opening of the application period for FAULT LINES, a landmark talent development and commissioning programme supported by Arts Council England through its Ambition for Excellence scheme.

FAULT LINES will support the creation of new works by artists and practitioners which contribute to the dialogue between technology, innovation, culture and society. The programme will encourage work across artforms and sectors, exploring specifically how artists can have an impact on innovation in the technology sector.

This exciting opportunity offers up to 5 different artists support for a period of 2 years in the development of their careers, and includes a number of opportunities to commission new artistic works as part of major innovation projects, such as CityVerve, the UK’s Internet of Things demonstrator, as arranged by FutureEverything.

The final goal of the programme is to develop new forms of sustainability for the creative practice of digital artists working today, encouraging cross sector collaboration and providing resources for art from beyond the arts. FAULT LINES will reimagine the studio for the 21st century new media art generation.

For this call, FutureEverything are looking for creators actively crossing the boundaries between art, design, science and innovation. Artists who, through their work, are opening up new dimensions and forging new visions of the role of technology in the future of society. They must be enthusiastic about cross disciplinary research and interested in developing their practice, working hand in hand with practitioners from other fields.

The deadline for applications is 10 AM Wednesday 9 November. For further details on FAULT LINES Open Call visit http://futureeverything.org/news/fault-lines-open-call/.

What is a Media Lab? Situated Practices in Media Studies is a resource created by Darren Wrestler, Jussi Parka, and Lori Emerson for those interested in discussing both the theoretical and the practical/infrastructural aspects of media lab. From the words of its creators:

Media labs are liminal but increasingly powerful spaces in many contemporary settings. They appear in universities and colleges, wedged uneasily between traditional departments and faculties. They’re also in basements, warehouses, strip malls and squats. They are stable to varying degrees; many have long-term addresses and an itinerant roster of occupants. Some pop up in one location for a few days, then relocate to another. Sometimes they’re even in mobile trucks in the streets, bringing tools and expertise to children in schools and the general public. As clusters of tools and talent streamlined to produce economic value, labs sometime align with the most ruthless of venture capitalists; in other cases, they are free and open for all to use, disdainful of all commercial motivations.

Despite their sudden visibility due to the burgeoning of the digital humanities, media labs have a surprisingly long history. As part of the historical avant-gardes, media arts labs were the sites where the new materials and aesthetics of technical modernity were developed. They often share a common ideology, tied not just to the neoliberal drive to privatize, innovate and disrupt, but to long-standing modernist ideas about creative destruction, quantification and the value of scientificity.

While offering a critical genealogy of the notion of the media and humanities lab, the project investigates some of the affordances it can offer for the scholarship and research in the 21st century. If you also believe in media lab’s potential to open up new possibilities for thought and action in the present join the discussion at http://whatisamedialab.com/.

In partnership with Raw Finery, a hybrid fashion and technology lab situated in Toronto’s downtown core, Subtle Technologies announces its inaugural artist-in-residency program: VISAR, or the Virtual Reality and Immersive Storytelling Artist Residency. Positioned as a project animator, this 6-month residency will allow an individual media artist to explore the critical potential of virtual reality technologies through the creation of a public art piece that fuses video games, fashion design and wearable technology.

As virtual reality looks to become the new standard in video game entertainment the experience of immersion promises to also become associated with daily life. Artists have an important role at this point in time to adapt and reframe such visioning technologies for socially and politically-engaged uses—creating alternative realities that disrupt the status quo and offer non-commercial experiences. Scholarship on the value of “ludic technologies”, or technologies for play, has also shed light on the powerful potential of gaming for casual learning and collaboration. With this in mind, the VISAR program asks makers with media backgrounds to consider new modes of narrative and storytelling that prioritize the virtual body, the fluidity of digital space and fashion-as-interface.

Interested applicants are invited to submit a project proposal using the submission guidelines listed below. The successful resident will be provided with access to studio space, financial support for necessary hardware and software, on-site technical resources and creative consultation for the duration of their project, including the exhibition of their finished work.

Application for VISAR closes midnight, October 13th, 2016. More information and submission guidelines available at http://subtletechnologies.com/visar/

The ACADIA 2016 Conference, held October 27-29, 2016 at the University of Michigan Taubman College, will foster design work and research from the worlds of practice and academia that lie at the intersection between procedural design, designed environments and autonomous machines. More specifically, this conference will seek to explore recent work within the current trend in computational design to develop and apply quasi-cognitive machines; the integration of software, information, fabrication and sensing to generate mechanisms for interfacing with the physical realm.

Specific topics around big data, sensate systems, and embedded responsiveness will combine interdisciplinary endeavors involving fields such as material science, biology, art, computer graphics, civil engineering, and human-computer interaction.

The ACADIA 2016 exhibition POSTHUMAN FRONTIERS: DATA, DESIGNERS AND COGNITIVE MACHINES will be held at the 3000sf Liberty Research Annex Gallery in downtown Ann Arbor, and will highlight experimental projects and design work in which methods, processes, and techniques have been developed or discovered that illuminate the conference theme.

More information available at http://2016.acadia.org/

This Fall, from October 6 through 8, the Retune Festival will transform Berlin school building from the past into a playground of the futures. The space will be turned into experimental design studios, workshops, lecture halls, and offline chatrooms.

Exhibitions, talks, and workshops are clustered around four main themes:

• Immersed Narratives – Exploring the opportunities of storytelling in virtual reality.
• Neuronal Creation – Expanding creative expression with Artificial Intelligence.
• Networked Transplantations – Extending bodies and senses.
• Creative Production – Investigating how creatives get from prototypes to products.

The Retune Festival explores the way creative entrepreneurs of all kinds get from idea to prototype to serial production. What is needed to bring ideas not just on the streets, but on all the streets in every city?

Sounds interesting? Check out the line-up of participating artists & speakers.

Recognition, winner of IK Prize 2016 for digital innovation, is an artificial intelligence program that compares up-to-the-minute photojournalism with British art from the Tate collection. Over three months from 2 September to 27 November, Recognition will create an ever-expanding virtual gallery: a time capsule of the world represented in diverse types of images, past and present.

A display at Tate Britain accompanies the online project offering visitors the chance to interrupt the machine’s selection process. The results of this experiment – to see if an artificial intelligence can learn from the many personal responses humans have when looking at images – will be presented on this site at the end of the project.

The software that powers Recognition incorporates a range of artificial intelligence technologies that simulate how humans see and understand visual images, including: object recognition, facial recognition, composition analysis, and context analysis.

The Recognition gallery is an astounding piece to explore in its entirety. Head at http://recognition.tate.org.uk/gallery

RadioEight lives at the intersection of audio documentary and interactive to offer an alternate measure of our condition on the planet: the subconscious dreams of the world’s children. Inspired by the concept of an 8th continent to which all children belong, RadioEight is an interactive soundscape dedicated to the hidden world of dreams.

By exploring the world of subconscious childhood dreams, RadioEight unlocks deep human connections that eliminate the barriers of geography, culture, language, politics, and economic status.

The project is centered on the dreams of children 7–13 as a developmental time when children begin to turn their focus away from their family, to the world beyond. The visions of earth’s youngest global citizens provide raw, moving answers toward creating a more emotionally connected humanity.

RadioEight was conceived and created by Katrina Crawford & Mark Bashore of Yonder, and made in collaboration with Belle & Wissell, Co. Original music by Jesse Solomon Clark.

Explore http://radioeight.net/#