To sum up in short, be part of a professional photo shooting (Saturday, January 23rd) and retrieve portraits for free afterwards!

(full resolution)

Translation of the description …

Nowadays all commercial images are heavily manipulated to achieve a certain level of quality. The “Beauty experiment” investigates the effect of retouching on our perception of aesthetics. If you participate in the “Beauty experiment”, a portrait of you will be professionally shooten, including make-up, hairstyling and clothing. Your best portrait will be digitally improven as well as deteriorated subsequently. All variants of this portraits, inclusive the original will be placed in an online quiz and evaluated by different people. The quiz is completely anonymous and will be online over a short period of time. You get all variations of your images in a printable quality for free afterwards. If you’re interested and fulfill the following criteria, write an email to velly@tzi.de, preferably with a photo of you.

CRITERIA FOR PARTICIPANTS:

tended appeal

european descent

age: 20 to 30

normal to sportive figure

face: no piercings and no tattoos

men: clean-shaven or scruffy

The photo shoot will take place on Saturday 23.01.2010 at the University of Bremen, within the 5th floor of the MZH.
In case of high interest, a second shooting would be possible.

Over the last three years, the MACE project developed concepts, tools and infrastructures to make digital information about architecture more accessible. An integral part of the project was the development of interactive visualizations that allow to search and browse contents about architecture in novel ways.

The workshop »Living with Information: Architecture and Visualization« (October 16 , 2009 at FH Potsdam) will juxtapose experiences and results from the MACE project with thoughts and design approaches from practitioners in the fields of design, architecture and technology. Guided by five central questions, we will explore future trends in information visualization, the relationship of visualization tools and creativity plus issues like information over- and underload.

The workshop was hosted by Prof. Boris Müller and Moritz Stefaner.

Tuesday, December 8th. 20:00, Haus der Wissenschaft, located here.

Just an announcement for a open scientific talk, related to the topic of ethics in computer science digital media. Might be of interest for the DM Master students, participating in Master Digital Media lecture at the university, as this talk is strongly related to artificial intelligence and ethics.

Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay.

Describing Turing’s treatment as “horrifying” and “utterly unfair”, Brown said the country owed the brilliant mathematician a huge debt. He was proud, he said, to offer an official apology. “We’re sorry, you deserved so much better,” Brown writes in a statement posted on the No 10 website.

More.

We are not even consumerist; we are a society of distraction, idle talk, and ambiguity. Everybody knows everything has happened, everything is automatically trivial, and, again, nothing means anything. This is the world of blogging, the fake world of Facebook, the world that compensates for an absent set of social experiences. There are virtues to social-networking sites, I’m sure, but you feel an awful vacuum at the heart of them.

The whole interview. Simon Critchley.

The International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA) has been taking place in prestigious institutions across the globe since 1988. It is organised under the auspices of the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA Foundation), an international non-profit organisation that promotes the relationship between arts, science and digital technologies.

Projects and papers for presentation at the ISEA2010 RUHR exhibition and conference in August 2010 can be submitted online until 15 September.

Art and Electronic Media

After last year’s Mark Amerika workshop, there will be another compart workshop – this year with art historian Edward Shanken. It will happen from the 13th until the 17th of July at the OAS @ Linzer Straße in Bremen. Shanken recently published a comprehensive book on electronic art, Art and Electronic Media. Rhizome just published a short review of the book here.

INC was founded by Geert Lovink, a renown media theorist in social critique of network- and ciber-culture. Lovink’s research homes on in the use of media tools and technologies to openly distribute ideas outside of the official channels. He is an internet activist and scholar particularly interested on Tactical Media, as means to achieve participation thus becoming part of the dominant media.

Lovink’s participatory discourse might be partially bounded to that of Jenkins, although each has a cultural perspective absolutely different. As Jenkins’, his view is sympathetic to the mass media, the digital media production tools are for liberation and not instruments for alienation. For Lovink our task as artist, developers, designers, and researchers is to tackle the dominant media in an open dialogue to the free circulation of ideas. For Jenkins that already happens in grass-roots media without the need of artists, designers and so on. Both see the Internet as the plateau that fulfils all the conditions for active media participation.

By the mid 1990s he co-founded the famous mailing list <nettime> a vast repository of  discussions in media theory in different languages, most of the key figures in our field(s) are filed there.

Hanging around in Internet I visited Lev Manovich website.

Manovich recently published a new book, I guess by now many of you have already put your hands on it and devoured it piece by piece, however to my surprise nobody has posted it here . Right now that many are in the process of Master Thesis writing this text, free available online, might be of special interest.

Manovich is one of the most quoted researchers of contemporary media studies and has a particular interest for data mining, and data bases that recently has led him to what he calls the ‘software revolution’.

Below the link to download the book

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/11/softbook.html