The Basic Plan - On Sunday September 20 at 2pm, MTAA, Mike Koller and anyone else who wants to join us will set out a brightly colored blanket surround by a circle of chairs at McCarren Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They will have amplified iPhones on which they have downloaded touchscreen drum and bongo applications. They will have open amp jacks that you can plug into. For the next hour we will attempt to "jam."

As explained by Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead "The main objective (of a drum circle) is to share rhythm and get in tune with each other and themselves. To form a group consciousness. To entrain and resonate. By entrainment, I mean that a new voice, a collective voice, emerges from the group as they drum together."

As explained by M.River of MTAA "The main objective of the iPhone Drum Circle is to get a total stranger to do a little dance on our blanket. That and hopefully enjoying the last summer Sunday in the park this year for an hour."

-- FROM THE PROJECT SITE

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The debut Abandon Normal Devices (AND) launched in the North West of England, 23rd -27th September 2009. The inaugural festival was centred in the city of Liverpool with satellite events taking place in Manchester. AND, a collaboration between FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool, folly in Lancaster and Cornerhouse in Manchester positions itself as a mixture of new cinema, digital culture and media art, showcasing work in partnership with galleries, venues and public spaces around the city. Over five days, the festival featured a broad array of conferences, talks, exhibitions, screenings, performances and online works, with artists and practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds including, The Yes Men, MARIN (Media Art Research Interdisciplinary Network), Blast Theory, DJ Spooky and Michael Connor. FACT acted as the central hub for the festival and hosted the majority of screenings, talks and events; it also celebrated its 20-year anniversary on the opening night.

In line with its snappy title, the festival set out to discard all that is typical, regular or average, seeking to question normality in an array of forms. There was a particular focus on exploring disruption to traditional methods of production and distribution in cinema and media art. Interfering and interrupting the familiar and ordinary were played out in public space, on screen and through performance.

The festival opened with a new performance/lecture by Carolee Schneemann, renowned for her performance work of the 60’s and 70’s that challenged the normalised perceptions of the body, sexuality and gender. In a work which took the format of a lecture, titled Mysteries of the Iconographies, Schneemann went on a journey through the creative products of her life from early childhood drawings, through painting, to performance and video installation. The performance was accompanied ...

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Warmail is a live, collaborative software performance, led by Jeremy Bailey, commissioned by HTTP Gallery in London, UK. Warmail uses the audience's latent song and dance potential to write and send an email to my mother while simultaneously directing a space war campaign

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S DESCRIPTION

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Created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

I first discovered Processing in 2003 at ITP while exploring different options for creating a set of tutorials about generative algorithms. We quickly realized that Processing could transform our approach to teaching programming and have adopted it as the language learned by all incoming students. I’m thrilled to have this chance to talk to Casey and Ben a little about the origins of Processing, their philosophy, work, and plans for the future. - Daniel Shiffman

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This is an example of early computer graphics animation developed by Jane Veeder at the Electronic Visualization Lab, using the Datamax UV1 graphics system and ZGrass programming language.

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The computer graphics for the first Star Wars film was created by Larry Cuba in the 1970s at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) (at the time known as the Circle Graphics Habitat) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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This Firefox Add-on uses the syntax of any webpage, and changes it into a beautiful Web 1.0 amateur page. This is my tribute to all the pioneers of the web.

-- FROM THE PROJECT SITE

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Technically, the work is executed as an add-on for the Web browser Firefox (v. 2.0.0.*); its execution involves the use of a number of Internet or computer technologies. I myself have executed the program in its entirety, which I emphasize because I consider the idea of the work and the execution of it as an indivisible whole that emerged over a period of development in which these two aspects were constantly interacting....

The image of any give Web page (or the visible part of the Web page if it is bigger than the computer screen) is understood as a matrix that reproduces itself. The size, height, and width of the reproduction are transformed depending on the matrix. The reproduction is placed in a selected section of the matrix and becomes part of it. The process repeats several times. The result is an unrepeatable visual structure that is based on manipulations of the particular Web page.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

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With recent mistakes by companies and organizations not knowing how to properly censor online documents, its easy to see why people believe the text they can’t see can’t be read. And with computer illiterate people like Rush Limbaugh, it is easy to befuddle them with the apperance of censored text on the web pages they commonly visit.

A playful experiment in “censoring” a web page by hiding text and images behind blocks.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

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Tumbarumba is a frolic of intrusions—a conceptual artwork in the form of a Firefox extension. Tumbarumba hides stories—twelve new stories by outstanding authors—where you least expect to find them, turning your everyday web browsing into a strange journey.

-- FROM THE PROJECT SITE

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