Recently published Digital Icons Issue 19 includes a comprehensive interview with CYLAND MediaArtLab founder Anna Frants along with CYLAND artists and curators Ludmila Belova, Alexandra Dementieva, Victoria Ilyushkina and Elena Gubanova. Titled “Women and Tech in the Post-socialist Context: Intelligence, Creativity, Transgression”, the interview is based on CYLAND MediaArtLab role in developing new media art scene in St. Petersburg, Russia.

New media art is an extensive concept, which unites a number of different art forms made with the help of media technologies such as digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, internet art, interactive art, video games, computer robotics, 3D printing, cyborg art and art as biotechnology. Media art has existed in Russia for more than twenty years and female artists were the core developers of media art in St. Petersburg. Taking the CYLAND media art laboratory as its vantage point, this interview with five artists aims to give an account of the history, key works, exhibitions and ideas in St. Petersburg media art. The artists participating in this interview are Anna Frants, Ludmila Belova, Alexandra Dementieva, Victoria Ilyushkina and Elena Gubanova. They all have exhibited their works extensively both in Russia and abroad and contributed significantly to the development of Russian media art and CYLAND’s development as one of the leading media art institutions in Russia.

Full interview can be accessed from the Digital Icons website.

Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (Digital Icons) is an online publication that appears twice a year. The journal is a multi-media platform that explores new media as a variety of information flows, varied communication systems and networked communities. The main goal of the journal is to disseminate research on new media in the region across global communities of scholars, media practitioners and the general public.

Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art, a recent book by Janine Randerson, includes mentions of the CYFEST’s Weather Forecast: Digital Cloudiness theme as well as Weather Station 1, Atmospheric Acoustic Transducer, an artwork by Alexey Grachev produced by CYLAND MediaArtLab.

Published by The MIT Press in their Leonardo series, the book is an exploration of artworks that use weather or atmosphere as the primary medium, creating new coalitions of collective engagement with the climate crisis.

In a time of climate crisis, a growing number of artists use weather or atmosphere as an artistic medium, collaborating with scientists, local communities, and climate activists. Their work mediates scientific modes of knowing and experiential knowledge of weather, probing collective anxieties and raising urgent ecological questions, oscillating between the “big picture systems view” and a ground-based perspective. In this book, Janine Randerson explores a series of meteorological art projects from the 1960s to the present that draw on sources ranging from dynamic, technological, and physical systems to indigenous cosmology.

Randerson finds a precursor to today’s meteorological art in 1960s artworks that were weather-driven and infused with the new sciences of chaos and indeterminacy, and she examines work from this period by artists including Hans Haacke, Fujiko Nakaya, and Aotearoa-New Zealand kinetic sculptor Len Lye. She looks at live experiences of weather in art, in particular Fluxus performance and contemporary art that makes use of meteorological data streams and software. She describes the use of meteorological instruments, including remote satellite sensors, to create affective atmospheres; online projects and participatory performances that create a new form of “social meteorology”; works that respond directly to climate change, many from the Global South; artist-activists who engage with the earth’s diminishing cryosphere; and a speculative art in the form of quasi-scientific experiments. Art’s current eddies of activity around the weather, Randerson writes, perturb the scientific hold on facts and offer questions of value in their place.

Janine Randerson is a media artist and curator and Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at Auckland University of Technology.

For more information on the book, visit https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/weather-medium.

Now welcoming submissions, The Lumen Prize is an international award that celebrates artists working with digital technology.

Deadline: June 1, 2018

ENTER THE PRIZE

Open to emerging and established artists working with technology and digital media, the competition offers a prize fund of $11,000, plus shortlisted and winning artists will have their works included in Lumen’s annual programme of exhibitions and events around the world.

Now in its 7th year, The Lumen Prize has already awarded over $50,000 in prize money and has staged over 40 exhibitions worldwide, in cities including London, New York, St Petersburg, Shanghai, Amsterdam and Athens.

The 2018 prizes are:

• Gold Award ($4000)
• Moving Image ($1000)
• Still Image ($1000)
• AR/VR ($1000)
• 3D/Interactive($1000)
• Founder’s Award ($1000)
• The BCS Artificial Intelligence Award ($1000)
• Meural Student Prize ($500)
• People’s Choice Award ($500)

The 2018 Jury Panel includes:

• Carla Gannis, Professor of Digital Arts, Pratt Institute, New York, Winner of the 2016 Lumen Prize Founder’s Award
• Bruce Wands, Chair Emeritus, School of Visual Arts, New York
• Fei Jun, Head of Media Lab at China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts
• Irini Papadimitriou, Digital Programmes manager, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
• Foteini Aravani, Digital Curator, Museum of London

The closing date for entries is 1 June 2018 at 11:59 GMT. The winner will be announced on September 27th at the Lumen Prize Winners’ Gala in London.

Shortlisted artists and recipients of The Lumen Prize from other years have gone on to achieve success around the world. Carla Gannis, 2016 Founder’s Award winner and 2018 Jury Panel member, has recently been commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Art for the net art project Sunrise/Sunset; Rachel Ara, shortlisted for the 2016 Still Image Award, has begun a residency at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and Alexandra Handal’s web-based Dream Homes Property Consultants, winner of the 2014 People’s Choice Gold Award, has been acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark.

Key information:

• Administration fee of US$47.50 for two works and US$23.75 for each additional work. Fees go directly to the prize fund and associated exhibitions
• You must select a category to enter from: Still, Moving Image, AR/VR, 3D/Interactive and the BCS AI award
• The Student Prize is only valid for still and moving image. To enter the Student Prize contact: info@lumenprize.com
• Digitised versions of traditional artworks will not be accepted
• Deadline for submissions is June 1 2018 For more information visit www.lumenprize.com or contact info@lumenprize.com

The Zooetics+ Symposium commences Friday, April 27, 2018 with the sessions “What Does Ecosystemic Thinking Mean Today” and “Knowledge Production Through Making and Living with Other Species,” discussing the habits of thought associated with cybernetics and the transition towards new thinking, inspired by sympoietics. The day will be finalized with a session speculating on what non-human imagination could look like in the session “The Radical Imagination: Toward Overcoming the Human.”

On Saturday, April 28, the program will explore further devices for ecosystemic thinking, discussing relevant artistic methods and practices in the panel “Artistic Intelligence, Speculation, Prototypes, Fiction.” “Creating Indigenous Futures” will be explored through bringing Indigenous values together with science and technology. The need for other, alternative vantage points—of species, of time, of traditions, of beings will be addressed in the session “Futures of Symbiotic Assemblages: Multi-naturalism, Monoculture Resistance and “The Permanent Decolonization of Thought.”

The symposium will conclude with a roundtable and launch of a new artistic research program “Sympoiesis: New Research, New Pedagogy, and New Publishing in Radical Inter-disciplinarity.”

Zooetics+ will be accompanied by a program of performances and installations by Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Allora and Calzadilla, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, Rikke Luther and NODE Berlin/Oslo.

Zooetics+ is part of ACT’s program recognizing the 50th anniversary of the founding of the renowned Center for Advanced Visual Studies, a predecessor to ACT.

Online registration closes at midnight EST on April 24. Onsite registration will be available throughout the Symposium. Hurry up to reserve your seat!

For detailed schedule and description of program sessions follow the link here.

The Zooetics+ Symposium at MIT is co-produced by Jutempus Interdisciplinary Art Program and MIT Program in Art, Culture & Technology (ACT). Co-presented by the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), and sponsored, in addition, by the Office of the Dean of the School of Architecture + Planning, MIT.