Randall shared this documentary trailer with us this morning on one of my favorite New York artists. I’ve heard great things about it and can’t wait to see it.

Our friend KAWS was in The New York Times Magazine this Sunday.

Donnelly, who works under the name KAWS, has been taken on by the Gering & López Gallery in New York, where he’ll have a show this November. He will also exhibit a batch of paintings at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Miami in September and will have another solo exhibition early next year at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles. Sandra Gering, of Gering & López Gallery, had not heard of Donnelly before another artist she works with included him in a group show last summer, but she is clearly smitten with Donnelly’s bright, clean, slightly off-kilter canvases that often riff on pop-culture figures like the Smurfs or the Simpsons. And she figures there’s another market for his work. “I think it needs to get out there in the art world,” she says.

By ROB WALKER Published: August 3, 2008
via: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03wwln-consumed-t.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=kaws&st=cse&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Yes! Now we don’t have to go all the way to Tokyo to see him rock a solo exhibition. Go KAWS go!

The Archegram: Iterations are a series of video projects centered around the audio/visual collaborations of James Elliot (Ateleia) and Sadek Bazaraa. They first started collaborating at the end of 2004 for the Netmage digital arts festival in Italy.

Civilization IV - Age of Empire is a project by Serbia based Eastwood Real Time Strategy Group (Vladan Joler and Kristian Lukuc) that explores and simulates the flow and control of information and capital. This work is based on the Sid Meier’s Civilization III game engine, it displays the relationships between some main determinants of global culture such as the military entertainment complex i.e. militainment, immaterial labor, the pharmaceutical industry and the net economy etc.

The game creates a socio-economical model, mapping the processes, flows, comparativeness and differentiation in the market which simulates activities of some of the world’s top IT corporations.

The name, Civilization IV, is questioning the copyrighting of the word “Civilization” by Sid Meyers & Co.. Usage of Civilization III engine is an act of appropriation of the world famous real time strategy game as universal cultural heritage.

Eastwood creates and uses computer games as tools for new visions of art and cultural practice. They use Civilization IV as a medium to express their attitude towards contemporary social cultural practice and to map and visualize how systems are functioning.

For the 2008 International Symposium on Electronic Art in Singapore AIR exhibition, Eastwood collaborating with G³ Lab will continue the project showing a new modification named Civilization V. The juried show features 16 works arising out of a 3 month residency each selected artist undertook in Singapore, working collaboratively with local organizations.

Breaking free from the industrial constraints of the multi-million dollar videogame industry, the project ironically comments on the ways games are developed and marketed, while revealing how digital art can intersect with the wider world.

via: http://www.isea2008singapore.org/exhibitions/air_civilV.html

Civil V is a game in which self-reflexively addresses the competition for dominance between new media companies working with 2D social community systems, such as Facebook, YouTube, and immersive 3D spaces such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. In order to advance through the game, ‘companies’ will have to use tactics like ‘Emotional blackmail’, ‘Tribal marketing’ and ‘Love bombing’. The artists also created a promo video about the ‘making of’ Civil V, showing how its creation is a global enterprise, involving programmers, designers and artists from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

Last night I had the opportunity to listen to David Levine of IBM Research (Zha Ewry in SL) and Adam Frisby of DeepThink Labs (Adam Zaius in SL) discuss OpenSim and virtual worlds interoperability at the NY Metaverse Meetup. One of the more interesting and complex points of discussion dealt with issues surrounding the security and enforcement of digital assets when the walled gardens open up to a larger universe of connected virtual spaces.  While being able to fight a battle in WOW chopping off the head of an opponent and carrying it into Second Life, HOME, etc. sounds appealing, the complexities of protecting developers creations, UGC, etc. become a larger hurdle to be dealt with.

All of this spawned a good bit of discussion around the studio this A.M. about the value of digitally created works. Coincidentally a somewhat similar discussion has been taking place on the NY Tech Meetup Mailing List about wether or not it is illegal to reproduce another website design which lead me to read about the Orphan Works Act of 2008

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA) have introduced two similar bills in the House and Senate that threaten to dismantle 100 years of copyright protection, rights guaranteed to authors the U.S. Constitution. The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 (S. 2913) and the Orphan Works Act of 2008 (H.R. 5889) allows anyone to use a copyrighted work without first obtaining permission.

“The Orphan Works bill has the potential to erode the protection that copyright owners have fought for over many years,” says past President of the California Copyright Conference (CCC) and the Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP), attorney Steve Winogradsky. “It puts the burden on the copyright owner to find the offending parties and either negotiate with them without the remedies currently available to bring about reasonable compensation or bring costly litigation. In short, for copyright owners, the Orphan Works bill is a disaster.”

via: http://www.prweb.com/releases/copyright/orphanworks/prweb1119934.htm

Currently under US Copyright law “Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device”. The work does not need to be registered with the US Copyright office to be protected, however, it would need to be if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. All this is fine and dandy until you start to consider international intellectual property rights enforcement.

All of this is such a grey area for me but definitely interesting food for thought as things exponentially grow into a hyper-digital future where ideas of value and compensation mutate and evolve.

As seen in The New York Times

New York’s Central Park is to be a landing pad for the new Chanel Spacecraft like pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid. The 7,500 square foot pavilion holds commissioned art from about 15 contemporary artists. The building itself is constructed of lightweight panels that can be packed in 51 shippable containers. Coming October 20th - November 9th.

We are now offering a free PDF download of our very first self-published book, The Elizabeth Kent Story. Compiled and designed between 1999 and 2002 the book is a collection of pages, both individual and collaborative, from the members of GH avisualagency, formerly Graphic Havoc. The Elizabeth Kent Story was originally offered as a limited and numbered edition of 1000 and has been sold out for years.

Download the file and enjoy a glimpse into our early publishing endeavors.

The Elizabeth Kent Story

thisissand.com is a website for play. It changes the pixels on the screen into digital sand that can be used as building material for cosmic landscapes, Clemens-style sand paintings, mandalas and so on.

This is a joint project of the designers Johanna Lundberg and Jenna Sutela with the Flash programmer Timo Koro. We wanted to create a playground of colours and sound for people to play with us in our sandbox - within the computer screen.

The digital sandbox on thisissand.com takes after the physical one. The user is allowed to do what he or she wishes with the elements in the sandbox. Sometimes the resulting pieces are expressive, sometimes they become more abstract. And just as a real world sandbox, the one on thisissand.com can be smoothed out and re-sculpted again time after time.

Just like the actual sand gets its colour from its origins, the sand used on thisissand.com covers the RGB palette natural to digital environments. Also the sounds of the falling sand on thisissand.com resemble a real life phenomenon: singing sand is discovered in about 35 desert locations around the world where the wind triggers a low-pitch sound in the natural sand. Instead of nature’s frequencies the digital sand generates white noise, which is a random signal with a flat power density. It is considered analogous to white light which contains all frequencies - like the RGB sand on thisissand.com.

The specialities of the digital sand lie in the possibility of saving the original pieces of sand art in the gallery or printing them out. thisissand.com can also be used year-round, anywhere and anytime. The sand doesn’t fall or wear out.

We are adopting the Fluxus attitude and experimenting with perceived connections between everyday artefacts, intermediality, art and play. There is no such thing as a linear plot or a particular set of expectations on thisissand.com: it is a place for recreation and fun, and an eternal work in progress.

http://www.thisissand.com/

UT GRAND PRIX 2009
UNIQLO’s annual T-shirt design competition since 2004, the 5th “UT Grand Prix” will call for entries from July 15th.

UNIQLO has actively developed its global expansion as a casual wear brand from Japan, opening flagship stores in New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Korea and China, and also shown the global promotion campaigns that world people can participate such as UNIQLOCK and UT LOOP!

Based on the concept of “T-shirt Design Olympics”, UT Grand Prix calls for T-shirt designs from young & upcoming creators from all over the world. Works will be chosen from more than 10,000 submissions in the first and second phases of judgment, & these will be shown on the web. In the final stage, 20 designs will be selected by presiding guest judges, & these designs will then be sold as UT (UNIQLO T-shirt) at UNIQLO stores. Cash & other prizes will be also presented to the winner(s). The Grand Prix (top) prize is 3 million JPY (or equivalent in local currency at current rates).

Submission Period: July 15th - September 21st, 2008
http://www.shift.jp.org/en/blog/?p=216

AMUSE ARTJAM 2008

AMUSE ARTJAM, a new art competition by a Japanese agency for all-round entertainment “AMUSE”, will open calling for entries from August 1st.

This is a competition that has counted more than 5000 submissions and total 70000 visitors in the past 6 events, gathering attentions as a gateway for young artists to success. This year as a new project, they will open a new gallery for contemporary art called “ArtJamContemporary” in the art complex building “NADiff A/P/A/R/T” in Ebisu, Tokyo. The participants of ARTJAM will be mainly featured in the gallery and sent to the world.

Anyone can participate in this competition regardless of genders, nations, ages, educations, professionals or amateurs, and genres. However, the competition winners need to participate in the award ceremony, which will be held in The Museum Of Kyoto on October 5th, 2008.

Submission period: August 1st - 31st, 2008
http://www.shift.jp.org/en/blog/?p=215

12TH JAPAN MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL

CG-ARTS Society with Agency for Cultural Affairs and The National Art Center, Tokyo will start calling for entries for 12th Japan Media Arts Festival. They seek vibrantly creative works that are opening up a new era in each division of Art, Entertainment, Animation and Manga.

Submission Period: July 17th - September 26th, 2008
http://www.shift.jp.org/en/blog/?p=212

DOTMOV FESTIVAL 2008

Online magazine SHIFT presents DOTMOV Festival 2008, a digital film festival aiming to discover talented creators and provide them with an opportunity to show their works. Works submitted from all over the world will be screened throughout the world venues from November 2008 (Date will be different depending on the venue). Last year’s total submission was 297 works from 34 countries. This year’s tour will be Sapporo, Sendai, Shizuoka, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Sao Paulo.

Submission Period: September 20th, 2008
http://www.shift.jp.org/mov/

SHIFT 2009 CALENDAR COMPETITION

Shift has been trying to offer artists many platforms to showcase their works online. The Shift calendar competition held from 2003 successively, pushes the boundaries between online and off line using a “calendar” as its medium. Entries are invited from all over the world and selected works will be distributed throughout the world in the format of a physical calendar.

This year, selected works will be exhibited and sold at PRINT’EM web site for a year with support by PRINT’EM, a graphic print center operated by Mitsubishi Paper MIlls Limited.

Submission Period: September 10th, 2008
http://www.shift.jp.org/2009/

Trash pile from David Ellis Dozens show in NYC, music composed by flickr: lamuerteblanca AKA roberto lange he is amazing! check out his work at robertolange.com

video via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fatblood/