Call for 40 young research assistants for international research project

Tony Fang, PhD, Professor of International Business at Stockholm University, Sweden has the pleasure of recruiting 40 young research assistants to participate in his research project “Yin Yang – A New Perspective on Culture” during 2012-2013.

Funware Shared Artist in Residence:
Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam (NL)
BALTAN Laboratories, Eindhoven (NL)
Piksel, Bergen (NO)

CALL

BALTAN, NIMk and Piksel have launched an open call for proposals as part of the exhibition project Funware. We are looking for interesting new software art projects that can be developed in the period of June – November 2010 through a shared residency. The new work developed during the residency will be presented in the Funware exhibition at MU in Eindhoven, at HMKV in Dortmund and as part of the Piksel festival 2010.

This residency is a collaboration between three labs, based on a desire to investigate the ways and potential of working within a network of labs that support the exchange and sharing of resources and knowledge. The form of this collaboration aims to provide the most specific and relevant support to artists working on art and technology projects in residence. Knowing the capacities and competences of each lab/organisation, the residency exchange will offer targeted support (in the form of resources, space, technical support, local context and time) to be provided at different stages of the research and development of the project specific to each organisation. Off- and online dissemination of form and content via this partnership and the building of structural relationships are crucial to the collaboration.

FUNWARE

Funware, conceptualised by Olga Goriunova (runme.org), is an exhibition about the fun in software. Making and using what has become known as software is experimental, humorous, and eventful. However improbable it might sound for today’s all encompassing dullness of forms, databases, schedules and processors, “fun” has informed and guided the development of software from its very inception. The rise of net art and the changes the Internet and desktop computers brought to culture gave rise to software art at the turn of the millennia. Performed by amateurs, artists, alternative coders or professional programmers for “fun”, software art as an aesthetic practice questions, tangles and experiments with the materiality of software has subsequently lost its visibility again, as attention is turned to the social web and software applications for third generation mobile phones, which all harness some of the energies constitutive of aesthetic software. Funware reflects on the history of engagement with software, that demonstrates its non-industrial, non-professional, non-commercial, or non-academic character.

The exhibition demonstrates the trajectory of humour and affect as constitutional to software and computing. The exhibition aims to make such an ‘obscure’ technological object as software, open, palpable and approachable, bridging a gap between ‘serious’ production such as technology and ‘non-serious’ production such as different forms of art. The exhibition has a few distinct threads: games; ASCII; code art; a few vectors of AI; computers in popular culture; spyware, conceptual software, hardware modification, hacker/virus approaches, sound, software modification, pranks, participatory web. And as software is intertwined with the hardware it runs upon and the networks that construct the society in which it rules, the exhibition features a lot of projects dealing explicitly with computer hardware or the materiality of hardwareas well as engaging projects experimenting with sound.

We offer:
- Residency period at each of the different labs (residency time at location will be project dependent) in the period of June – November 2010. Specific dates at each location are to be determined in collaboration with the selected artist.
- Artist(s) fee.
- Production budget (including support of travel and accommodation, accommodation is not provided for in Amsterdam).
- Presentation of the project in the Funware exhibition in Eindhoven (MU) and Dortmund (HMKV).
- Public presentation of the results of the artist’s research at BALTAN Laboratories, NIMk and Piksel;
- Support for the documentation of the research and final work, and dissemination of this documentation.

Requirements:
- Proposals are welcome from professional artists worldwide;
- The concept should fit within the theme of the exhibition Funware, in which it will be presented;
- The work should be created using free/open source software;
- The artist should have experience working in collaborative settings with people from different disciplines;
- The artist must be willing and able to travel to Eindhoven, Amsterdam and Bergen for residency periods (exact dates and period will be made in accordance with the artist);
- The artist must be willing to openly and thoroughly document the artistic process.

What are we looking for:
- Outline of the concept underlying the work that you wish to develop (200 words max).
- General outline of the scope of the final work (200 words max – please include visual sketches).
- Outline of the research and development plan for the work (250 words max)
- Motivation for why you would like to work in the context of this particular residency as well as an overview of your interest in the technologies mentioned above (250 words max).
- Indication of your planning divided between the three labs, i.e. what would you like to develop where.
- Up-to-date CV including links to previous work.

Please send your submission to call@nimk.nl
Deadline for submission is Friday 23 April 2010.

The candidate is chosen by representatives from the three partner organisations. Applicants will be informed by May 10th.

ABOUT THE DIFFERENT VENUES

Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam, NL)

http://www.nimk.nl

The Artist in Residence (AiR) programme at the Netherlands Media Art Institute supports the exploration and development of new work in digital/interactive/network media and technology based arts practice. The residency provides time and resources to artists in a supportive environment to facilitate the creation of new work that is produced from an open source perspective. We encourage a cross disciplinary and experimental approach. This is a practice based residency designed to enable the development and completion of a new work. The Netherlands Media Art Institute offers an open environment with technical assistance and an active advisory board which will give feedback and support in technical, conceptual and presentation issues. There is access to studio and exhibition equipment, technical support from the Institute's staff and production help from interns. We expect the artist to have knowledge and insight in the technical realisation of the concept.

BALTAN Laboratories (Eindhoven, NL)

http://www.baltanlaboratories.org

BALTAN Laboratories initiates, supports and disseminates innovative research and development activities in the field of art, technology and culture. A two-year pilot initiative located in a space of 500 m2 at Strijp S in Eindhoven, it is a first step towards a broader Art Science Lab in the former NatLab (Philips physics laboratory). BALTAN is a laboratory in-the-making that aims to ‘do things differently’, providing space, a critical framework and support for artistic research into technological culture. The pilot phase is intended to develop a radical and sustainable identity for the laboratory of the future in relation to the current state of technological art and culture, and the total context of BALTAN Laboratories (including its local context, history and peers). The Funware residency exchange with NIMk and Piksel in 2010 is an integral part of this research. BALTAN offers an open and flexible residency context in which we dialogue closely with the artist throughout the development of their project. Interaction with other research projects being undertaken at BALTAN is key to all residencies at BALTAN. We provide support for documenting, disseminating and reflecting on the research process and results of the residency, and offer a unique local context in which to work. BALTAN’s core team includes four artistic advisors: Marc Maurer (Maurer United Architects), Geert Mul, Gideon Kiers and Lucas van der Velden (Telcosystems).

Piksel (Bergen, Norway)

http://www.piksel.no/

Piksel is an annual event for artists and developers working with free and open source software, hardware and art. Part workshop, part festival, it is organised in Bergen, Norway, and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, doing workshops, performances and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of free and open source software.
The development, and therefore use, of digital technology today is mainly controlled by multinational corporations. Despite the prospects of technology expanding the means of artistic expression, the commercial demands of the software industries severely limit them instead. Piksel is focusing on the open source movement as a strategy for regaining artistic control of the technology, but also a means to bring attention to the close connections between art, politics, technology and economy.

Netherlands Media Art Institute
Keizersgracht 264
1016 EV Amsterdam
T 020 6237101
F 020 6244423

http://www.nimk.nl

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