Call for works for a giant public screen in Birmingham.

Deadline 31 March, 2006. More on Big Screen at Wikipedia: BBC Big Screen.

Also note: The Prix Ars Electronica deadline has been extended until 24 March.

Some calls for proposals that ought to be of interest to Generator.x readers. Sorted in order of deadlines, note that the first two deadlines are this week.

Alva Noto: Concert (video)

Fenwick: What I know about stem cells

Back online after a few days spent at the AV.06 festival in lovely Newcastle, where the architecture is baroque industrial (except for Norman Foster’s very sci-fi Sage Gateshead) and the local females brave the sub-zero conditions in flimsy tops. This is only the second time the AV festival has been organized. The last (2003) version was a VJ- and film-oriented event. This year director Honor Harger and her team has created an ambitious event around the theme “Lifelike”.

Spanning three cities (Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Sunderland), it features commissioned performances and installations by artists like Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto, see live video) Michael Nyman, Critical Art Ensemble, Ken Rinaldo and many more. Concerts and VJ culture are still important to the programme, as is film (the Tyneside Cinema is one of the organizing partners). The festival includes not one but two premieres of new work by experimental filmmaker Richard Fenwick, including an excellent deadpan edutainment piece on stem cell research.

All in all, a very strong showing of varied events, successfully mixing film and VJ culture with classical music and media art. The festival is on for another week, if you’re in the neighbourhood be sure to drop by.

Disclosure: I participated in the festival with a new projection piece commissioned for the Sage Gateshead and with System C in the Animated Drawing programme organized by the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. My thanks to Honor, Fiona, Dan, Mark, Adam, Beckie etc. for assistance and hospitality. I’ve uploaded a Flickr set from AV.06.

Another year begins, and Generator.x continues. The second incarnation of the Generator.x exhibition opens in Stavanger on 14 January, at Tou Scene. We’re looking forward to see how it will be received over there. Stavanger has a good scene for electronic music, and is home to the Numusic festival (also at Tou Scene). i/o/lab is a local electronic art workshop, with aims to becoming a full-fledged node in the Norwegian electronic art network.

We are currently in discussions with a new possible partner to see if it will be possible to organize a new Generator.x conference. Date and location is still to be determined, but if it happens it will probably not be in Norway. We’d like to keep the event moving around, activating local resources. Get in touch if you have any ideas or proposals in mind.

Ultrasound: TileToy and Pan Sonic

Ultrasound 2005, 21-25 November
Media Centre, Huddersfield, England

The Ultrasound 2005 festival is just around the corner, filling Huddersfield with audiovisual performances, experimental music and media art. The list of artists include Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman (who together and solo will perform in 3 different projects), Jan Robert Leegte, Pan Sonic, Sue Costabile, Owl Project and many more.

This year, Director Tom Holley has decided on an interesting twist. In cooperation with PixelACHE organizer Juha Huuskonen this year’s festival has a section called “Finnish Partition”, presenting a number of Finnish artists and performers. The legendary noisemakers Pan Sonic (pictured above, in front of the TV tower in their current home town, Berlin) will perform, as will Grey Zone. Exhibited projects include Kick Ass Kung-Fu, the classic Habbo Hotel and the Open Source "Modular Electronic Game Prototype" TileToy.

There will be a TileToy workshop during the festival, see the workshop page for information. It looks like a great lineup, sure wish I was Finnish in Huddersfield.

Ars Electronica festival 2005

September is around the corner and so is the annual Ars Electronica festival. The Processing project won the prestigious Golden Nica in the Net Vision category this year, an excellent acknowledgement of several years of hard work on behalf of Mr.Fry and Mr.Reas.

As always there’s a lot of events to catch, like Zachary Lieberman’s performance piece Drawn and the concert evening Listening between the Lines (with visual performances by Erich Berger, Golan Levin and many others). With Processing winning the Net Vision Nica, the Net Vision Forum will be a must.

Hope to see some of you there, I’ll try to blog from the site if time allows.

PixelACHE 2006 have just sent out a reminder of their Call for Projects, which I blogged a while ago. Since the last post they have decided to remove the national requirement we mentioned, so now all artists are free to apply. The deadline is 10 September, see the PixelACHE web site for details.

The Berlin Transmediale festival has announced its 2006 incarnation, to take place 2-7 February 2006. Unlike previous years, no unified theme for the festival has been announced. Also new, the Transmediale award is no longer divided into categories. In 2001, Transmediale broke new ground by announcing Software Art as one of their award categories (see the 2001 jury statement for reference.)

The call for submissions has a 2 September deadline, and can be found here (PDF).

Please note that work can be submitted either for the Transmediale.06 award or for the Club Transmediale. With Berlin being the world capitol of electronic music, a great club night event is a given. Inevitably, the Club Transmediale has in the past been a hotbed of experimental aural and visual performances, ranging from injury-inducing breakcore nights to beautiful visuals. If you have an interesting performative audiovisual project, send it to the CTM crew.

Boris Müller: Poetry on the Road

Boris Müller is a computational designer and educator based in Berlin. His work combines an analytical approach with a personal signature. This strategy is used to great success in his series of posters for the poetry festival Poetry on the Road. To create the graphics, Boris writes software that interprets texts and turns them into visual representations.

The 2003 version is particularly beautiful, with each letter of the alphabet being interpreted as a command to draw lines or change the quality of the line being drawn. The result is a complex tangle of shapes, expressive and poetic in their own right but also containing the code of the original poetry that was used as input. There is a simplified interactive version online to illustrate how it works.

Boris recently became professor for Interaction Design at Fachhochschule Potsdam, where he teaches students using Processing and Flash. Expect interesting work from Potsdam in the future…

The organizers of the Helsinki-based PixelACHE festival have published preliminary information about their 2006 event. PixelACHE 2006 will take place in Helsinki and Paris, continuing the 2005 theme of “DOT ORG BOOM / LE BOOM DOTORG”. There is a call for proposals, but it is open only to artists in Finland and France. For more information about PixelACHE, check out their blog.