The Lumen Prize for Digital Art celebrates the very best art created with technology through a global competition, exhibitions and events worldwide. A not-for-profit based in Wales, UK, Lumen’s annual juried competition draws entries from artists globally and has given away more than US$50,000 in prize money since its launch in 2012.

For 2018, The Lumen Prize partnered with CYLAND MediaArtLab to exhibit in St. Petersburg 2016 Lumen Prize Gold Award winner Hyperplanes of Simultaneity by Fabio Giampietro and Alessio de Vecchi and the 2017 Founders Award, Slide to Expose by by Nicole Ruggiero, Molly Soda, and Refrakt alongside a showreel of selected moving image works.

The call for entries for the seventh Lumen Prize, with a prize fund of $11K, is now open. Details of the awards and the judging process are available here.

Project Torino is a research project from Microsoft Research Cambridge. Researchers have designed a physical programming language and scheme of work (lessons) for teaching the primary school computing curriculum to learners regardless of their level of vision.

Learners put together pods to create code that plays music, stories, or poetry. An accompanying app provides a self-directed scheme of work that learners can work through under adult supervision. Learners are gradually introduced to reading or listening to their code in a textual form to support transition to coding in secondary school.

This scheme of work includes concept introduction, a range of activities, and challenges, and ways to assess knowledge and understanding. It covers all of the major concepts in the primary computing curriculum, including: sequences, repetition, selection, variables, (and threads). In addition to these basic coding concepts, it also provides a number of challenges to push computational thinking. Not least, it encourages creative play with computation. The scheme of work is accompanied by a set of tutorials and a teacher resource guide.

Given the high demand, Microsoft Research Cambridge is considering to run the Project Torino Beta in both the autumn and winter terms of the school year (2017 – 2018) in the UK.

Learn more about Project Torino at https://aka.ms/torinobeta.

Studio International publishes an interview between Natasha Kurchanova and Alexandra Dementieva. The interview covers Dementieva’s recent exhibition “10 Installations” at the MMOMA, produced by CYLAND MediaArtLab.

In this interview, Alexandra Dementieva shares her thoughts on the purpose of art and technologies, her inspirations and the use of technologies to engage an audience. Her interactive installation projects attempt to widen the mind’s potential for perception using different production materials: computers, video projections, soundtracks, slides, photography, etc. The projects explore the spectator’s depths of perceptual experience and the interaction of the individual spectator with the exhibition as well as with other visitors. The subject of an installation or its production method becomes less important to her than the mind of the user. Thus the latter becomes the center of the project or the main actor in the performance.

Read the interview: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/alexandra-dementieva-interview-10-installations-moscow-museum-of-contemporary-art

More information on Alexandra Dementieva’s “10 Installations” exhibition: http://archive.cyland.org/lab/cyland-opens-the-exhibition-of-alexandra-dementieva-s-installations-at-the-mmoma/

Transmission Video Art Festival invites competition entries from around the world on the theme“We Are All in this Together – A Road Map Through a Post-Truth Art World”.

Does art have anything to contribute to the post-truth, post-democracy world? Is it the time forus to start producing noise, politicizing aesthetic practices or just turn full-time towards political activism? In the era of post-truth politics, alternative facts and fake news campaigns undermining ourdemocracies, we would like to invite experimental film makers and video artists to take a standin the overwhelming ethical ambiguity of our time.

The competition is open to all forms of moving image-based artworks on a single-screen. Entries selected by our international jury of experts will be screened during the TransmissionVideo Art Festival taking place simultaneously in Karlsruhe (DE), Warsaw (PL) and Kassel (DE). You will find a short description of our event and its concept online under www.transmission-festival.eu.

The deadline for entries is 15th of June 2017.

May 26, CYLAND MediaArtLab brings curated programme of screenings by Russian female artists at Art Fair Suomi.

Art Fair Suomi is a unique meeting place for the public, artists and art professionals. It is an international contemporary-art Festival with a sales exhibition of contemporary art and various visual-art events: discussions, screenings, and more.

See the report from the art fair and the exhibition below:

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More on CYLAND’s video art screenings at Art Fair Suomi: http://archive.cyland.org/lab/cyland-organizes-video-art-screenings-at-art-fair-suomi/

New works by Nam June Paik are discovered at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, reports Smithsonian Magazine.

Etude 1 along with the recently recovered TV Clock will debut in the exhibition Watch This! Revelations in Media Art, which opens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum April 24 and runs through September 7, 2015. The show includes works by Cory Arcangel, Hans Breder, Takeshi Murata, Bruce Nauman and Bill Viola, among dozens of others, and will include 16 mm films, computer-driven cinema, closed-circuit installations, digital animation and video games.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/new-works-nam-june-paik-discovered-smithsonian-american-art-museum-180954571/#U0qCwU4dluKgV09B.99

April 1, Tessart, a new exhibition place for art and technology, opened in St. Petersburg. Located on Karavannaya ulitsa 1, at the city centre, it will focus on promoting emerging artists working with interactive and immersive technologies. See the report from the opening below by CYLAND’s Anton Khlabov.

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Visit http://www.tessart.place/ for more information.