Neal Stephenson's Metaverse reigns supreme. One of it's current incarnations- the multi-user virtual universe Second Life claims a population of 8.5 million avatars. SL is embraced by many as an innovative and safe fantasy scape - enabling play, creativity, education, companionship, love and lust. It is reviled by some as a cesspit of antisocial isolationist addictive behavior; and SL is dismissed by others as simply an over-inflated hype driven commercial venture expounding the values of property acquisition and commodity exchange. Whatever your perspective, SL is serious business with an exchange rate which fluctuates against the $US and an estimated Second Life avatar electricity consumption equivalent to the average citizen of Brazil. In this seemingly infinitely expandable universe aesthetic endeavours, creative constructions and artistic performances are enacted daily.
-empyre- talks to some of those who make it happen:
---> Annabeth Robinson (UK) is a Second Life Artist focusing on interactive and sound driven projects, Metaverse consultant and Sim builder, Lecturer - Design for Digital Media at Leeds College of Art and Design. aka AngryBeth Shortbread
---> Patrick Lichty (US) is a technologically-based conceptual artist, writer,independent curator, co-founder of the Second Life based performance art group, Second Front, animator for the The Yes Men, and Executive Editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine.
---> Stephan Doesinger (AUS) is a conceptual artist and architect. His second book"Learning from Sim City," will be published in September. He initiated Bastard Spaces the 1st Annual Architecture and Design Competition in SL to be announced at Ars Elctronica. aka Doesi Beck
---> Dr Ricardo Peach (AU) is the Program Manager for the Inter-Arts Office at the Australia Council for the Arts, which is funding a SL residency. Born in Volksrust, Mpumalanga in 1968, he and his family migrated to Perth, Australia in 1980. aka Ricardo Paravane
---> Christy Dena (AU) is researching changes to art and entertainment in the age of cross-media production for her PhD at the University of Sydney. Dena works as an industry strategist, mentor, educator and journalist. aka Lythe Witte
---> Dr Fabio Zambetta (AU) lectures at School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University Melbourne and researcher in the area of 3D embodied conversational agents, 3D virtual environments, and interactive storytelling. aka Fabio Forcella
---> Kathy Cleland (AU) is a writer, curator and lecturer in the Digital Cultures Program at The University of Sydney and is currently completing her PhD investigating avatars, digital portraiture and representations of the self in virtual environments. aka Bella Bouchard
---> Adam Nash (AU) is a media artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer who works in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. His work has been presented at SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Venice Biennale. aka Adam Ramona

This month, we open up the context of the much-awaited Documenta 12 and attendant Magazine Project to our network.
-empyre- contribution can be found in the online Magazine
If you've been to Documenta, fire away, send us your observations and
critiques; even if you haven't.

--->No special guests this month - it's about our network as a group and your individual views.

This month -empyre- will concentrate on the construction of identity among artists who have explored notions of 'feminine' identity at one point or another -especially how it relates to space and landscape. The emphasis of thediscussion will focus on the play between 'real' and 'virtual' space,as it is so much a part of the everyday and a powerful tool forartists to promote and create their works. The discussion will alsofocus on how curators have worked with artists with these concerns.
Our guests include performance artists Barbara Campbell (AU), Jill
Magid (US) and Stacia Yeapanis
---> Barbara Campbell is a performance artist who has worked with the contextual properties of all kinds of sites since 1982. Her current project is 1001 nights in which she performs a short text-based work for 1001 consecutive nights. Theperformance is relayed as a live webcast.
---> Stacia Laura Yeapanis is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Chicago her recent works include Everybody Hurts exploring mediated emotion and the fansite, My Life as a Sim, and Commercial-Free: The Museum of TV on DVDexploring fandom in relation to museum curation.
---> Jill Magid seeks intimate relationships with impersonal structures. She works with police, secret services, CCTV, and forensic identification systems which function at a distance, equalizing everyone and erasing the individual.

From surveillance and mobil technologies to fears and public panic, the ambivalent attraction of technologies of terror shifts between
post 911 and post-cold war sensibilities, on international and cross- generational zones of engagement. We consider panic, paranoia and critical resistance in public spaces mediated by the threat and fear of violence, in the context of mobile media.
---> Horit Herman-Peled (IS) is a media artist, theorist, and feminist activist in Tel Aviv, who teaches art and digital culture at Talpiyot College, Tel Aviv, and at the Art Institute, Oranim College, Kiryat Tivon, Israel
---> Brooke Singer (US) is a Brooklyn-based digital media artist and arts organizer. A member of Preemptive Media, her most recent
collaborations, both as an artist and curator, utilize wireless as tools for initiating discussion and positive system failures.
---> Paul Vanouse (US) makes data collection devices that include polling and categorization (for interactive cinema), genetic experiments that undermine scientific constructions of identity, and temporary organizations that performatively critique institutionalization and corporatization.
---> Sean Cubitt (AU) teaches media and communications at the University of Melbourne. Among his numerous books on cinema and new media are EcoMedia, The Cinema Effect, and Digital Aesthetics. Sean has curated numerous exhibitions and is Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Book Series for MIT Press.

énoncer (FR): to convey 'in a particular manner of speaking or presentation,' quite similar to English 'enuciation,' perhaps with more subtle depth. With the passing of Baudrillard, it seems timely and important to reflect on how philosophy matters, how it is énoncé, in our lives.
---> Aliette Guibert Certhoux (FR), Paris. Editor, intellectual, avant-garde activist. "Elle imagine trois siècles de diversité socialeen même temps, sans diplôme et sans parti sinon celui de l'insoumission légitime au troisième millénaire, ce qui fait la complexité insolente, mais sans complexe, de l’actualité de la directrice des publications, de la revue criticalsecret.com --, toutes disciplines confondues y font le lit de l'indiscipline féconde."
---> McKenzie Wark (AU/US) is the author of Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press, 2007), A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press 2004) and other things. He teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.

In collaboration with Documenta 12 Magazine Project. The edited text of the conversation is availabe here.
Are we at the margins of a huge flattening and empty-ing out process leaving the shells of modern structures yet producing something of an ethos, a critical space? "Artists educate themselves by working through form and subject matter; audiences educate themselves by experiencing things aesthetically. How to mediate the particular content or shape of those things without sacrificing their particularity is one of the great challenges of an exhibition like documenta. But there is more to it than that. The global complex of cultural translation that seems to be somehow embedded in art and its mediation sets the stage for a potentially all-inclusive public debate (Bildung, the German term for education, also means “generation” or “constitution,” as when one speaks of generating or constituting a public sphere). Today, education seems to offer one viable alternative to the devil (didacticism, academia)and the deep blue sea (commodity fetishism)." --Roger Beurgel, artistic director, documenta 12
---> Ricardo Rosas (BR) editor of the Rizoma e-magazine and a former member of the Midiatatica.org network. Rosas helped organize the Mídia TáticaBrasil 2003 and the Digitofagia 2004 festivals in São Paulo. Rosas was the Net Art curator of the Prog: Me festival, in Rio de Janeiro (2005). Rizoma, his edited website on arts and activism is currently taking part on the Documenta 2007.
---> Melinda Rackham (AU) is networked artist curator and writer and currently Director of ANAT, Australia’s peak body for artists working with emerging fields, science and technology, experimenal sound and portable and networked medias.
---> Sharon Daniel (US) teaches classes in digital media theory and practice at UC Santa Cruz,. Her research involves collaborations with communities that focus on the use and development of information and communications technologies for social inclusion.
---> Chris Molinski (US) director of The Art Gallery of Knoxville, a community space devoted to discussions of new and emerging art in Knoxville, Tennessee. Recent exhibitions have involved collaborations with the Center for Urban Pedagogy, Max Neuhaus, and the exhibition "Distribution Religion" with Critical Artware, People Powered, and Temporary Services.
---> Claudia Reiche (DE) is a media theorist, artist, and curator. Her work focuses on (cyber)feminist approaches to questions of how man/ machine relations are designed with words and images. She is a member of thealit Frauen.Kultur.Labor, and of the first international cyberfeminist alliance 'old boys network'
---> Ollivier Dyens (CA) is Chair of the Department of French at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is the founder and
webmaster of Metal and Flesh 1998-2003, as well as Continent X . He is the author of Metal and Flesh, MIT Press.
---> Iliyana Nedkova (BG/SCT) Iliyana is Creative Director New Media at Horsecross, Perth where she is responsible for curating the
Threshold artspace, Scotland's first dedicated gallery for digital public art. A founding Co-Director of ARC: (with Chris Byrne), a curatorial practice working nationally and internationally with artists, exhibitions, art fairs,editions and critical context.
---> Christiane Robbins (US) is an artist scholar in digital imaging, database aesthetics, and spatial studies.Her work is found in permanent collections including the Stedlijck Museum, Amsterdam, Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Kitchen, NY, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Getty Museum. She is aAssociate Professor at USC, LA.
---> Øjeblikket (DK) (editorial collective: Karin Hindsbo, Mikkel Bolt, and Kristina Ask) is a magazine based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded in 1993, it is dedicated to the theory and critique of contemporary art. Øjeblikket is a participating magazine in the documenta 12 magazine project.

The historical metaphor of the Crusades is still alive concerning and in presentday Middle East, both as a memory and in relation to contemporary conquests, as well as in the rhetoric of empire.Today artists, writers and theorists merge in the world, document it and, instead of trying to conquer it, show passion and compassion, denounce, take part, engage themselves. Films, photos, texts and installations talk about jails, fences, workers with precarious jobs paperless immigrants, political turmoil and mayhem. Fine Arts is today the arena of political discussions and activist practices.
---> Ana Valdés (SE) is a writer, social anthropologist and activist, working with gender, class and race issues in cyberculture. She has published several books and started in the year 2000 the network Equator, http://this.is/Equator, together with Cecilia Parsberg.
---> Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and member of the cooperative Magnum Photos since 1976. She is the author of Carnival Strippers, Nicaragua, Kurdistan In the Shadow of History and Encounters with the Dani. In 1992 she was a MacArthur Fellow.
--->Cecilia Parsberg (SE) is a visual artist who works with power and sexuality, how power structures permeate our daily lives. Her gaze changed from the outsider to the participating: the image exist between us, the task of the artist is to “activate the image".
---> Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquez (MX) was born in Havana, Cuba in 1958. MFA in Multimedia and Video Art, University of Iowa. Interdisciplinary artist, writer, Fulbright scholar and executive curator of Arte Nuevo InteractivA, a leading new art exhibit and laboratory in Latin America. He heads the Multimedia Department at the Superior School of the Arts of
---> Loretta Napoleoni is the author of Terror Incorporated and Insurgent Iraq. She is an expert on financing of terrorism and advises several governmentson counter-terrorism. She is senior partner of G Risk, a London based risk agency.

If we assume that technologies carry with them a certain utopia,we ask if there is - and if so, what is - the utopia embedded on digital informational technology? The cybernetic paradigm aims a world of perfect informational flux - that is, a world without noise. A
paradox: as significant field of art-works and art-activism developed as "social noise" are forced, in order to circulate throughdigital networks, to formalize themselves in noiseless terms - those demanded by digital apparatus. .
---> Michelle Kasprzak (CA/UK) is a curator, writer and artist, currently Programmes Director of New Media Scotland.
---> Hamed Taheri (DE) is an Iranian-born theatre director and performer
---> Miguel Leal (PT) is co-director of Virose, an interdisciplinary non-profit organization dedicated to art and media technology
---> Johannes Birringer (UK) is a choreographer and artistic director of AlienNation Co , and co-founder of atelematic performance collective (ADaPT). Author of Media and Performance (1998), Performance on theEdge (2000), Dance Technologies (2007). Founder of Interaktionslabor and co-director of DAP-Lab, Brunel University, where he is Professor of Performance Technologies.
---> Maria Moreira (BR) in 2004 completed a PhD researching on installation art as a mode of address that articulates tactics of dispersal to investigate the world as multiplicity. She is an Associated Lecturer at University of the Arts London and Universidade Candido Mendes, in Brazil.

A dialogue between Ryan Griffis and De Geuzen, provided an opportunity to explore themes underlying their participation in the Chicago chapter of Jordan Crandall's UNDER FIRE project. UNDER FIRE is an ongoing art and research project that explores militarization and political violence. It delves into the structural, symbolic, and affective dimensions of armed conflicts: the organization, representation, and materialization of war.Some of the areas of discussion included: research as practice, approach to creative production, DIY tools, amateur vs. professional forms of activist practice, notions of commitment and issues of engagement.
---> Ryan Griffis (US) is an artist and sometimes-amateur writer, curator and tour guide.
---> De Geuzen (NE) is a foundation for multi-visual research.. comprising Riek Sijbring, Femke Snelting and Renee Turner that has been collaborating since 1996.

Mobile media is not only about accessing something that is /not here/, but also about moving along with the flow. shifting even further towards nomadic procedures that blur the boundaries between frontiers and stable knowledge and allow tracking and surveillance, exposing user spaces and identities.
---> Paula Rousch (PT/UK) Brought up in the favelas of Lisbon, joined the International Red Corps to access education and research mobile strategies of display and mediation. She is a developer a collective archive of tactical audio and arphieldRecordings
---> Lucas Bambozzi (BR) is a media artist and curator. Recent exhibitions at Share Festival in Italy, at Videoformes in France with a large retrospective of his single-channel videos and at HTTP Gallery in UK/London. His most recent curatorial projects: SonarSound at Instituto Tomie Ohtake; Digitofagia ) at MIS, Nokiatrends at Anhembi, andMotomix Art & Music Festival at MIS/Mube.
--->Marina Vishmidt (UK) is a London-based writer, researcher andeditor of the NODE.London Reader: surveying art, technologies and politics (NODE.London, 2006), and is a frequent contributor to Mute magazine and MetaMute website, Untitled magazine, Producta Reader (Barcelona, 2007) and Art and Social Change
--->Joanna Callaghan (AU)'s projects include Mobile Dream Telling, Show me the Monet, a radio discussion program concerning the relation between art and the economy, KISSS - Kinship International Strategy on Surveillance and Suppression,
---> Luis Silva (PT) curates in new media, developing and curating lx_2.0, Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea's online program. Silva haswrites on art and technology for Turbulence's networked_performance, Rhizome and newmediafix.
---> Heather Corcoran (CA/UK) is an independant producer/curator as well as Emergent Technologies Coordinator at SPACE Media Arts where her current project , Tagged, is on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). She is also an organizer of NODE.London

An open mike on Pacific Rim and new media practice, in terms of two metaphors, 'journey' and 'bridges', following the ISEA Pacific Rim New Media Summit (PRNMS) on August 7 and 8, 2006 in San Jose, California Among discussion participants were:
---> RAQS Media Collective (IN)
---> Danny Butt (NZ)
---> Fatima Lasay (PH)
---> Sally Jane Norman (NZ/UK)
---> Gunalan Nadarajan (SG/US)

In collaboration with Documenta 12 Magazine Project. The edited text of the conversation is availabe here.
"What is bare life? This second question underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension to it – a freedom for new and unexpected possibilities(in human relations as well as in our relationship to nature or, more generally, the world in which we live). Here and there, art dissolves the radical separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation. But what does that mean for its audiences?"(Roger Beurgel).
---> Michele White (US) 's "The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship," is new with MIT Press. Her latest research includes two book projects: Buy It Now: Lessons from Imaging eBay and Elements of the Internet: Rethinking the Network and Information Technology Workers. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University
---> Tina Gonsalves (AU)’ creative investigation integrates art, science and technology to enrich the public understanding of the hidden emotional language of the body. Converging technology and video, she creates embodied interactive audiovisual experiences. She currently has an AHRC/Ace arts and science fellowship at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of London
--->Susana Mendes Silva (PT) recently intstalled Mind Walls in a group show at Museu da Cidade (Lisboa), and has developed the work Sheet for vector and for hidden agenda, contemporary art editions. Her media art is found internationally since 2002, including Free Manifesta, manifesta 4, Frankfurt, prog:me, Rio de Janeiro, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art / Rhizome Artbase.
----> GH Hovagimyan (US) worked with Gordon Matta-Clark on Days’ End, Conical Intersect, Walking Man’s Arch, and Underground Explorations. Active in performance art, written and language works, GH used text conceptually in installation. His internet radio/TV talk show, Art Dirt, is part of the Walker's Digital Studies Archives. His new work involves mash-ups online with new art dirt redux
--->Conor McGarrigle (IR) runs Stunned.org . His art has dealt with themes of surveillance (Spook...) , identity (PLAY-lets) and art activism (IrishMuseumofModernArt.com), often involving fictional identities with an element of prankstavism. He is currently working on Google Bono : a google maps / surveillance camera mashup.
---> Jordan Crandall (US) teaches at the University of California, San Diego. His current project _Under Fire_, concerning the organization and representation of war, will open this winter at the Kunst-Werke, Berlin, and the Sevilla Biennial. _Drive_ is an
anthology of his projects and critical writing.His new video _Homefront_, explores psychological dimensions of the new security culture.

From the Greek roots syn ("union") and aesthesis ("sensation"), Synaesthesia is, literally, the convergence of senses. Though some have regarded the online experience as breathing new life into the mind/body problem, many artists are already working in a space that engages attention and sense in a convergence across a broader perceptual spectrum. Three artists will anchor the discussion of
synaesthetic aspects of on-line experience from their projects at insertsilence.com and hippocrit.com.
---> Guest moderator Jennifer Gunther
---> James Patterson (CA) is a visual artist who also works as an illustrator, broadcast & web designer. James' synthesis of drawing, animation and programming exists online at thttp://Presstube.com and http://InsertSilence.com (shared with Amit Pitaru).
---> Amit Pitaru (IS/US) creates new tools to facilitate his work and work in audio-visual arts and interaction/usability design. Pitaru has exhibited and performed worldwide at the London Design Museum, (ICA), Israel Museum, Pompidou Center, and ICC Tokyo.
---> Joel Swanson is an artist and writer who currently teaches courses on art, technology, and media theory at the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado in Boulder. His work consists of articulated reading environments, both real and virtual.

In December 2005, the Anti-Terrorism Bill was pushed through the Australian Parliament.
This legislation has met with much concern from the cultural sector, human rights and freedom of speech advocates. On an international scale, the prosecution of Steve Kurtz from Critical Art Ensemble is a case in point. The ongoing court case with the US Justice Department has demonstrated the effect that the "war on terror" has on limiting free speech, particularly in the arts.In October 2005, Chris Connolly from the University of New South Wales, made a submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee, regarding 'sedition'. In the appendix, he comments that the best known use of sedition laws was during the period of McCarthyism in the USA in the 1950s. -empyre- asks the question: Are we as artists and cultural producers losing our right to express ourselves and comment on the state of society?
---> Lucia Sommer is an artist, writer, activist and member of CAE.
---> Claire Pentecost is an artist, writer and member of the CAE Defence Fund.
---> Nicholas Ruiz III was born in New York City.
---> David Vaile is the Executive director of UNSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre.
---> Dr Ben Saul is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales.

At Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Computational Poetics "aims to articulate a poetics of digital art performance while
developing a tool-set to enable artists working in the computational medium to create, present and document their work." How is artistic expression mediated through computing technology or the logic machine? What useful models can be found for emerging technologies in cultural traditions outside of contemporary practice? How to support these cultural traditions in the context of computational art?
---> Kenneth Newby works at the boundary conditions between embodied practice and responsive media. Recent
sound works include a commissioned web-audio work; a composition for gamelan orchestra and chorus, and work for spoken word.
---> Martin Gotfrit composes electroacoustic and acoustic scores for feature and documentary film, video, theatre, dance and the concert stage. Gotfrit is a founder of the Centre for Image and Sound Research, designer and curator of the Music Machines show.
---> Aleksandra Dulic has traveled in Bali, Indonesia to study the contemporary tradition of shadow play as a source for new media performance and animation and is one of the founders of the NewForms Media Society and the New Forms Festival.
---> Andreas Kahre has improvised over one hundred interdisciplinary projects with theatre, dance and music ensembles across Canada including Hextremities,Cymbali,Talking Pictures, Standing Wave, Hard Rubber Orchestra, and Vancouver Community Gamelan.

Whispering in the dark, conspiratorial incantations. Theory making sense of the place you’re stumbling around in. As an art project, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest appears at a time when globalization replaced localizable public goods with streamlined and
commercial products. The hype around New Media is just another example of this phenomenon, not only in the way new media art's ever present connection to the IT industry but also in the way that new media itself is one of the main conduits for this emptied out experience of culture. How can a discourse not be tied to the expression or promotion of particular industrial technologies? How
does new media and new media discourse impact communities and social justice? How does the commodification of discourse influence understandings of tactical media's possibilities?
---> Cara Baldwin was born on a military base at the end of the Vietnam War,received her MFA at CalArts in 2000 and has organized several projects that deal with public space. She's an independent curator, editor, artist and writer living in Los Angeles.
---> Ryan Griffis is an artist whose work takes the forms of writing, curating and otherwise performative activities, often in collaborative situations. He moonlights for the Temporary Travel Office - an investigation into the sub-rational desires for mobility.
---> Marc Herbst works with pirate radio, diy and grassroots media . He teaches web design, performance art and sculpture at UC San Diego and American Intercontinental University LA.sparkle[at]c-level.cc
---> Robby Herbst creates interventions in underground politics in LA, has participated in the creation of collectives (Radio Dumbo, Indymedia Seattle and Los Angeles, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest) and is excited about the JoAaP’s slide library.
---> Christina Ulke (DE/US) co- founded c- level (now beta-level) in LA’s Chinatown and is also a co- editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Ulke currently teaches at UCSD's Visual Arts Department.
---> Nato Thompson is a curator and writer + co-organizor at the Department of Space and Land Reclamation. "The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere," opened with the related book, "The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life.

Writing, one of the oldest known technologies, is altered by the way computerized operations change syntax--how words and paragraphs are organized--and deliver semiotically via internet and mobile technologies, stimulating new forms of writing and publishing. Is 'writing' still adequate to describe the most eloquent examples of creative processes involving words and digital media? Moderated by Marcus Bastos (BR) <http://www.pucsp.br/~marcusbastos/index.htm>
---> Bill Seaman (US) explores text, image, sound and interface relationships through technological installation and virtual reality productions. In 1983 he helped to pioneer interactive video while at MIT.
---> Brigid McLear (UK) project exploring the relationship between our real experiences of place and the ways in which place is imagined, constructed and proposed through virtual modes in writing, architectural drawing and digitial space.
---> Friedrich W. Block (DE) curates exhibitions of experimental literature, covering a range
of material that goes from visual to digital poetry including p0es1s. Digital Poetry Berlin 2004.
---> Giselle Beiguelman (BR), new media artist and multimedia essayist, develops art projects for mobile phones, SMS and MMS, and internet-streaming for electronic billboards. Her work has shown widley including and The 25th São Paulo Biennial.
---> Author Sue Thomas (UK) founded the trAce Online Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent University. She is currently co-editing, with Dene Grigar, a Special Issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac — 'Wild Nature and the Digital Life'

Five artists and collaborative groups were commissioned to make web- based projects for the latest edition of inSite, the binational
exhibition of site-specific work staged every few years along the San Diego/Tijuana border. Tijuana Calling is inSite_05’s first online
commission. Is it possible for new media artists to activate the net for the staging of projects responsible and responsive to communities that fall between legitimized power sectors, and if so how? The role of the artist as translator between points of origin and reception.
---> Mariam Ghani (US) translates her place / site / community-responsive practice online:"The places, communities and histories I'm interested in are almost all borderlands, liminal, transitional, contested, and narrated themselves in translation and counterpoint."
---> Lana Lin (US) is a New York-based media artist whose work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, China Taipei Film Archive, Taiwan, and the Festival de Femmes, Creteil, France.
---> Angel Navarro (US/MX) with Alex Rivera produced Lowdrone for INSITE2005/Tijuana Calling. The LowDrone, is the world's first airborne lowrider capable of transmitting video feeds from a wirelesscamera strapped to its body.
---> Ricardo Miranda Zuniga (NI/US) has shown at inSite05,and New Museum of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum's artport, Museu da Imagem E Do Som, Brazil, American Museum of the Moving Image, Bronx Museum, and online at Turbulence Net Art Commission

This month on -empyre-, we venture into the world of wearable technologies in the context of social and public art practice.
---> Katherine Moriwaki (US) is an artist and researcher investigating clothing accessories as the active conduit through which people create network relationships in public space.
---> Florian 'Floyd' Mueller (AU) designs interfaces that deliberately require intense physical effort to facilitate social connectedness between remote participants.
---> Heidi Kumao's (US) incisive feminist practice currently investigates the RFID tags that industry is adopting for product tracking, the government for border control and public libraries for automatic checkout.

This month's discussion joins with the Network Performance blog (Guest Helen Thoringtion writes:) "to take the take the pulse of current network-enabled performance practice, as artists investigate the possibilities opened by the migration of computing out of the desktop PC and into the physical world, and by the continuing advances in internet technologies, wireless telecommunications, sensor technologies and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The ephemeral conceptual art practices that came into existence during the 50s and 60s ­ with Happenings, Fluxus, the Situationists -- and that re-emerged as participatory works on the Internet in the early 90s, are now, with mobile networking technologies, networked sensors and embedded computing, proliferating as new ways of working and experiencing."
---> Helen Thorington is a writer, sound composer, media artist and the founder and co-director of Turbulence.org which commissions net.art and exhibits, archives, and promotes net artists work. She also founded and directed the New American Radio series whichcommissioned over 300 original works for public radio.
---> Michele Riel is an educator, artist, and designer based in San Francisco and Chair of the Department of Teledramatic Arts and Technology, an interdisciplinary program at California State University Monterey Bay. Her work has been seen nationally and she has received grants and awards including an Emmy Award for broadcast set design..

As the heritage of the Internet itself is essentially as a text-transmission device, it is unsurprising that textuality can still be explored, re-positioned and re-presented in compelling way. One of the most recent memes to infect mainstream culture, the blog, is suddenly an essential business tool, an important force in the ongoing development of journalism, and a new conversational network. Mixing the genres of the documentary, the journal, the personal conversation, the usenet discussion board, this month's artists bring the weblog into the realm of artistic practice in the network:
---> abe linkoln has a tattoo and wrote this funny email once.
---> jimpunk uses the tools of dataculture to create cinematic, yet linguistically-based work that asserts computer control over the browser.
---> Chris Ashley is an artist, writer, and educator living and working in Oakland, California who posts an HTML drawing every day, and regularly posts writing about art on his weblog
---> New Yorker Tom Moody mades low-tech art with MSPaintbrush, photocopiers, and consumer printers. His blog was recently recommended in the Art in America article "Art in the Blogosphere."

How do we preserve our contemporary networked art? For libraries and internet archival projects, the collection, archiving, storage, migration and emulation of donline content is a routine matter. How do these strategies transfer to networked art? This month we discuss the tenuousness and a tenacity of networked histories and records, the critical distinction between object and events based archiving and what happens to an archive when funding disappears?
---> Nancy McGovern Digital Preservation Officer at Cornell University Library with Virtual Remote Control (VRC);
---> Margaret Phillips, Paul Koerbin and Gerard Clifton from the PANDORA internet archive and PADI gateway at the National Library of Australia;
---> Michele Kimpton of the Internet Archive with its consultant sage the WayBack Machine;
---> Sharmin (Tinni) Choudhury, the software engineer for PANIC digital preservation project;
---> Meta data standards expert Dr Simon Pockley from Flight of Ducks;
---> Luciana Duranti (UBC), Yvette Hackett and Jim Suderman from InterPARES 2, Canada;
---> Kevin McGarry, the Content Coordinator for Rhizome Artbase;
---> Valerie leBlanc, an interdisiplinary artist who has just produced Facts and Artifacts on archiving;
---> and Doran Golan whose private collection of online art is located at computerfinearts.com

Aotearoa | New Zealand is currently experiencing a renaissance in media arts and culture. Much is bubbling to the surface from deep pools of creativity such as the Aotearoa Digital Arts list; recent and planned festivals include Version, SCANZ and re:mote; and exhibition venues include Artspace, the Physics Room, the Moving Image Centre and [NON] gallery. Our guests - net, sound and media artists, theorists, educators, curators and writers, are working in, or have recently returned to their home islands - bring fresh perspectives from the south. Our guests include:
--> The multifaceted Paul Annears who will expand upon their diverse practices, which include The Concise Model of the Universe;
--> Artist, writer, researcher and musician Susan Ballard who explores relationships between noise and materiality in digital installation art; --> Auckland-based artist, writer and curator Stella Brennan who, with Sean Cubitt, founded the Aotearoa Digital Arts discussion list; --> Independent consultant and researcher in the new media arts and Creative Industries, Danny Butt--> Pacific artist, writer and editor of art-themagazine.com, Ian M Clothier; --> Digital Artist in Residence at Waikato University, Adam Hyde, who is currently organizing the 're:mote' festival with Honor Harger and 'Ethermap'; --> Trudy Lane who works in online design and publication collaboratively creating projects which crossbreed participatory art & educational resources; and --> Rhizome and Furtherfield writer and theatre artist Helen Varley Jamieson who has been exploring the concept of cyberformance over the past 5 years.

November 2004 -Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life
Mitchell Whitelaw, Paul Brown, Mauro Annunziato, 
Ken Rinaldo, and Maria Verstappen.

Artist, writer and researcher Mitchell Whitelaw's new book "Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life" (MIT Press 2004) is the first detailed critical account of the creative field practice of a-life art. Whitelaw and eminent a-life practioners explore how artificial evolution alters the artist's creative agency;  the  complex interactivity of artificial ecosystems; the creation of  embodied autonomous agencies; the use of cellular automata to investigate pattern, form and morphogenesis; and well as examining the key tenet of a-life, emergence.
---> Mauro Annunziato, artist and scientist, founded with Piero Pierucci in '94 PLANCTON, to research the creative and aesthetical potentialities of chaos and artificial life, the relation between art and science, mind and society, communication and interaction.
---> Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has been specialising in art and technology, especially computational and generative art for over 40 years.  He was recently described by Mitchell Whitelaw as "one of the unheralded pioneers of a-life art".
---> Ken Rinaldo is an artist, theorist and author who creates interactive multimedia installations that blur the boundaries between the organic and inorganic. Integration of the organic and electro-mechanical elements asserts a confluence and co-evolution between
living and evolving technological cultures.
---> Maria Verstappen and Erwin Driessens have worked together since 1990. They received a 1st prize at LIFE 2.0 and LIFE 5.0, an international competition for Art & Artificial Life, with their Tickle robot projects.

September 2004 - Locative City
Jeremy Hight, Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman

Using locative media to "read" a space with GPS and wireless technology enables artists to dig into teh depths of the city. These narrative triggers draw many lines through archaeology, fiction, architecture and design, into the urban terrain. US artists Jeremy Hight, Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman use GPS data and interactive mapping to triggers live data through movement in downtown LA in thier locative media artwork 34 north 118 west. Naomi and Jeff will also debut a new GPS based 'interpretive engine' next month
at Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City.
--->LA based Jeremy Hight is a writer fascinated by the weather and 'agitated space'. His interdisciplinary work includes collaboration for experimental animation.
--->Naomi Spellman works in locative media, networked narrative, video, interactive computer-based works, photography, and graphic prints, and is Artist in Residence at the Media Centre, Huddersfield, U.K.
--->Jeff Knowlton is a transmedia artist based in Los Angeles working with information in virtual space. Currently Artist in Residence, Digital Research Unit, Huddersfield, UK.

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August 2004- network'O'rama - power and social networks
Networking sessions at ISEA and Ars Electronica

This year both ISEA and Ars Electronica have dedicated a stream of their conference and exhibition programs to the theme of building, analysing and visualising Networks:
---> Networks build strategic and powerful, social, critical and co-operative alliances. In art, speaking in term of networks, social network analysis and visualization of networks is almost becoming a genre. We are joined by Jonah Brucker-Cohen, creator of the frustrating and fun list for the super diligent subscriber -Bump List, <