Exposive Revelations (2008) by Daniel McKewen of the program Great Expectations.

NEXT WAVE festival - May 15-31 2008: a biennial festival all around Melbourne, presenting genre-busting new works by the next wave of Australian artists. The theme "Closer Together" refers to the way society is - for the better or for the worse - becoming increasingly connected by media and communication technologies.

Sceptical of the acclaimed social achievements of new technologies, the Brisbane-based artist-run initiative Boxcopy sets out to explore the futility of human activities with a collection of works entitled Great Expectations as part of the Membrane Project, a major site-specific exhibition, infiltrating the cracks and crevices of Federation Square.

A few other projects deal with media interventions in Public spaces such as Spinning a video projection by Kotoe Ishii is running on the Night Projection Window of the Centre for Contemporary Photography. Serial Blogger a unique digital narrative and performance installation based on a hyper-real crime scene investigation. The project invites audiences to pry into the lives of a group of bloggers who get a little too close to someone stranger than themselves a serial killer…. Esky a Moving architectural intervention is a quirky, curious and nomadic intervention, an unexpected inflatable bar and venue that will occupy periphery and unconventional urban spaces. Urban Screens wil be presented at the Polyphonic’s Forum 3 on Sunday 25th.

Wanted suspects on digital screens wasn’t a single social project proposed by screen operators. In the beginning of 2006, Lamar Advertising agreed to broadcast for free messages of national program AMBER Alert on its own LED signs in Connecticut. Later other screens of Lamar joined the project…"

I-sites and the Atrium at Federation Square, Melbourne

The deadline for submissions for our call for poster presentations has been extended to the 31. May 2008!

We are looking for researchers to present posters on the latest development in the interdisciplinary field of Urban Screens. Posters are ideal for presenting speculative, late-breaking results of ongoing research projects, drawing important conclusions from practical experiments, for giving an introduction to innovative art works or new practical design applications, reports on cutting edge technologies and content management systems under development.

To bridge the Conference and the Multimedia Exhibition posters will be displayed in an exhibition in the public Atrium precinct, next to the conference hall, viewable for all conference attendees and the general public. The conference audience will be gathering around the A1 posters during the poster session to engage with the author. Eight submissions will be additionally shown in an experimental presentation on the four outdoor I-sites around Federation Square. These are equiped with an integrated screen, which offer the possibility to present remotely via scheduled skype sessions, while the audience gathers in groups around them.

Poster online submission form - click here

The episode Playful Audiovision on blip.tv presents some documentations about projects shown at Urban Screens Manchester 07: Videos about the general overview, an Interview with Susanne Jaschko and the projects ‘A wall is a screen’, ‘Circulez Y’a A Rien A Voir’, ‘The Air Been Broken’, ‘D.I.Y. Ballroom’, ‘Man With A Movie Camera’, ‘2.4Ghz Homing Pigeons’ and ‘Megaphone’. Go to their show page for watching the videos.

A mesh LED net is temporarily covering the facade renovation at Piazza Duomo, Milan

The Urban Screen in Milan at Piazza Duomo became media partner of the project Check-in Architecture, a participative research project, inviting artists, architects, designers and sociologists, studying in the most prestigious universities in Europe, to tell stories about our cities in the form of 3 minute-long documentaries. The project interacts with its participants through a website, collecting and managing the documentaries via YouTube and GoogleMaps. It will also publish daily reflections on a blog. Check-in Architecture is also a free-press publication, a part of the Urban Screen programming and an exhibition taking place during the Architects’ Congress in Turin and the Venice Biennale.

"We at CIA have never really liked the word ‘content,’ as it makes art and advertorials one and the same, but let’s say instead of content, Urban Screen will be showing the Check-in Architecture documentaries, roughly between 3-4 and 8-9 everyday."

The Landmark Interactive Bus Stop  

The research project Flexible Urban Displays by David Bouchard and Sajid Sadi in collaboration with Orkan Telhan explores how programmable surfaces can be shaped and textured in more flexible ways than traditional LED displays. By using modular tiles as building blocks, displays can become an integral part of objects, structures and spaces. Through appropriate use of digital technology, a bus stops is turned into a sensual, engaging, memorable self-organized landmark.

DafurDafur at the Jewish Meuseum in Berlin, image by Helene Caux

DARFUR/DARFUR, conceived of by Leslie Thomas, is a traveling exhibit of digitally-projected changing images that provide visual education about the richly multi-cultural region while exposing the horrors of the ongoing humanitarian crisis. The event will present photographs taken in Darfur by internationally acclaimed photojournalists including a US Marine. Launched in New York on September 18th the exhibit will travel to 24 cities over 24 months

More than 200,000 civilians have been victims of violence in Darfur since February 2003. Executions, murders, rapes and the burning of villages are all part of the agenda. Over two million people are living in refugee camps on the border to Chad and at least four million - more than half of Darfur’s population - are completely reliant on international aid.

Source: Anouk De Clercq

A new Video installation by Anouk De Clercq is running on the SEVEN SCREENS in Munich from April 25 to November 9, 2008: Movement is the focus of her installation Motion for Newton. Inspired by the famous physicist’s laws of motion, the Belgian artist allows lines and forms to affect each other in an interplay with their direct environment.

Point of departure was an analysis of the OSRAM building’s architecture. The artist thus created a work that was specifically developed for its location and those passing by the site in their vehicles. The artist refers to her new work as Motion for Newton. This title stands for a “constructive mobile,” which is inspired by the vertical forms of the SEVEN SCREENS, as well as by the city’s architecture, high rises and sky scrapers. Forms encircle each other in continuous motion. The work’s main theme is the moving body in relation to its environment. The SEVEN SCREENS are transformed into "motion sculptures," which become a homage to Isaac Newton…

Los Angeles, 2009?

Here a short WIRED report about Sonny Astani, a real estate mogul who is planning to bring 2019 Los Angeles to life in the form of two 14-story animated billboards modeled on Ridley Scott’s opening sequence of Blade Runner….The idea, pending city approval, is to install hundreds of rows of LEDs, each spaced 6 inches apart, across the buildings’ floor-to-ceiling windows. So what will happen if our dystopian future movie visions are slowly reaised?

Thanks Sascha for the link!