The Thinkbox collective is based in and around Windsor, Ontario – across the river and border from Detroit – with all of its attendent musical history. The Detroit  based www.metrotimes.com predictably places Thinkbox in the context of Techno’s genesis, development and bifurcation as moving the techno/electronic aesthetic betond the club dance floors to the gallery and museum space.

Given the timing however (2003-2008) it would seem more likely that Thinkbox were rather more influenced by the increasingly ubiquity of (largely eurpoean) post glitch ambient electronica of the form popularised by the likes of Christopher Fennesz or the ‘Artic Ambience’ of Biosphere. That claim appears reinforced by the individual releases of Christopher Bissonnette one of the founding members of the collective.A sound and graphic designer, Bissonnette use of the guitar and field recordings recalls both Fennesz and perhaps Oren Ambarchi and fellow Canadian (Vancouver) Loscil. Other members of the collective include Mark Laliberte (http://www.marklaliberte.com/index2.html) - an independent curator , ‘project-based’ artist and experimental poet – who also performs ambient soundscape/design work – his Pillow Scenes Soundworks marked the first and only CD release for the collective. Mark has been heavily involved with the Zine culture and currently produces the design/pictorial magazine Carousel (http://www.carouselmagazine.ca/) while exhibiting a wide range of intermedia and installation works that are united by the kind of countercultural cool that belies their zine-culture influences. Chris McNamara is a Windsor based video artist who teaches new media at the University of Michigan. Chris also works with collaborator Dermot Wilson under the name Machydem Inc. – mostly producing film and digital video projects.  Steve Roy, Rob Theakston – an  electronic music producer working a similar vein to that of Bissonette -with a slightly more dissonant edge- and Bill van Loo –  an electronic music producer who also works with guitar to produce live ambient electronica (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGgsCV7gh88).

In ‘Prediction Pieces’ (1981-1991) Jones she explored ‘the way humans arrange the idea of the future within their minds’

The Darwin Translations (1994-99) explores Darwin’s theory of sexual selection across the animal and human and its relation to notions of sexual play.

Deep Water/Aqua Profunda (2001) is a video and sound installation exploring the nature of sexual intimacy (for the Venice Biennale).

The Avoca Project is a sprawling project that explores themes of immigration, subsistance, climate change, and community in the Victorian country town of Avoca.

The project is has so far included projects such as a water conservation systems, and a heightening of the ‘foreignness’ of the house as it becomes increasingly sustainable. Artworks are proposed that become indicators to measure and  increase awareness of the developing sustainability of the house – the aim is to build a house that signals its own use in ‘ magical’ as well as useful ways.

Some projects with which the lab is associated include:

Nexttext : nexttext.net – A project (based in Processing-Java) that allows the breakdown of text into unit hierarchies (phrases, words, letters) and to apply dynamic behaviours and interactions to those hierarchies.

Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace Project: http://www.abtec.org/

Mr Softie: A typographic text editor, for working with the nexttext framework.

Global Minds Project – Global Mind Project is a unique creative venture combining new media art, neuroscience and computer technology. The project was conceived by Karen Casey and undertaken in partnership with software designer Harry Sokol. Together they have developed a means of generating real time video art from brainwaves.
The Melbourne launch of the Global Mind project represents the first stage of an online artistic forum that will creatively engage people through public interaction and collaboration.

The ACVA’s first exhibition ‘Babelswarm‘ (2008 Nash, Dodds, Clemens), won the Australia Councils inaugural Second Life Artists in Residence aware. (See the project post for more detail on Babel Swarm.)

In 2010 the ACVA will launch ACVALab – an attempt to provide an incubator for emerging practices and practitioner while providing a collective interface for educators, curators and artists to extend and explore the development of virtual art. ACVALab started with a call for artist participants based on the central question; ‘What could a virtual art lab be if it was imagined by artists for artist?’

ACVA also plans to launch a critical journal.

ACVA Labs lists an impressive list of collaborators on the site including;

Coordinators:

Christopher Dodds – Artist and Produce founder of Icon.Inc.

Greg More – Director OOM Creative.

Adam Nash – Artist working in Digital Environments – SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Venic Biennale

Faciltators;

Dr Melinda Rackham – Adjunct Professor RMIT. Founder of – empyre – list/fourm.

Kate Richards – Artist and Lecturer in Convergent Media at UWS.

Guest Presenters:

Dr Justin Clemems: Artist, Lacanian Scholar.

Fee Plumley: ‘Techno Evangelist’ and owner of creative agency ‘the phone book limited‘ – Digital Program manager for the Australia Council for the Arts

Dr Troy Innocent: Senior Lecturer – Department Multimedia and Digital Arts, Monash University Melbourne.

Gillian Raymond:  Online Manager for the National Portrait Gallery (Canberra)

The ACVA and ACVALab projects are funded by the Australia Council for the Arts.

In 2005 he started Generator.x as a curatorial platform for generative art and design which has since resulted in a conference, a blog, a travelling exhibition and concert tour. Watz practices out of New York City and Oslo, where he is a lecturer at the Oslo School of Architecture and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Innovation and its relationship with experimentation and artists are particular interests.

Their website states

Artists are innovators, if a new piece of technology or a new medium, becomes available; artists want to try it, to experiment with it, to push the boundaries. Some artists take on the role of a scientist in almost a performative way and some scientists equally take on the role of artist. Attitudes to science, medicine and art have changed over the last five hundred years, in that whilst Science has become more formalized, Art has become increasingly less so. By stepping outside the testable hypothesis artists are free to go off at tangents, to get bogged down in aesthetics and be mavericks.

Packet Garden is a private virtual world generated by capturing information about how you use the internet. The open source software was created by the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist Julian Oliver. The software was commissioned by the Bristol-based contemporary arts centre, Arnolfini.

The software creates a landscape and grows virtual plants based on the servers you visit and the amount and kind of data you send and recieve. The information you harvest is entirely private and it is suggested that “you can think of packet gardens as pages from a network diary.”

Courchesne earned a BA in Communication Design from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974) and a MA of Science in Visual Studies from MIT (1984). In the early 1980s he helped pioneer the field of interactive video when he co-authored Elastic Movies (1984) with Ellen Sebring, Benjamin Bergery, Bill Seaman et al. Throughout recent decades he has continued to produce several interactive installations that combine light, photography, design, sound, film and video.

Courshesne’s installations characteristically encourage participants to enter into an immersion of images and sounds that is triggered and guided by use of their own voice and physical movement; the works attempt to remove all spatial reference to plunge the viewer into an interactive, virtual world within which they are able to transverse landscapes and communicate with real or fictional people. Courchesne’s ongoing interest in socialisation has grown more pronounced from each work to the next as his installations have themselves become more increasingly complex and advanced in their development and presentation mode. In Where Are You? (2005) visitors are invited to operate a joystick to control their flight through a world of several dimensions that are defined by an X,Y and Z scale – the higher the visitor travels to the ‘+’ end of each axis, the more detailed the world they experience is. Here existence is paramount, for the work is dependent upon the visitor’s whims and choices to define itself and reach its full potential.

Courchesne is based in Montreal where he is professor of information design at Université de Montréal. Courchesne is also a founding member of the Society for Arts and Technology.

NRPA was founded in 1981 with the purpose of supporting and developing radio art, a cultural movement encompassing experimental sound-based practices conceived to operate within the specific parameters associated with broadcast radio. The organization was considered to lie at the international forefront of radio art distribution between 1987 and 1998, during which over 300 works for public radio were commissioned and disseminated via the weekly program series New American Radio.

Taking heed of significant cultural shifts resulting from the expansion and proliferation of wireless and digital modes of communication, the NRPA extended its mandate in 1996 to support the then burgeoning practice of net art by launching Turbulence. The project and its associated website currently remains dedicated to commissioning and exhibiting the work of artists who either use existing applications and technologies or develop new ones to create innovative, hybrid or networked art forms that use the Internet as a primary medium. The organisation’s key channels for facilitating the creation and reception of new works are its Artists’ Studios, Guest Curator, Spotlight and Events programs. Importantly, the Turbulence website houses an online archive of over 160 projects commissioned by the body throughout its 13 year life.

Other NRPA supported projects affiliated with Turbulence include the Networked_Performance research blog (2004 -), a valuable resource that chronicles the wide range of issues and perspectives linked with various network-enabled practices, and the Networked_Music_Review blog (2007 -), which accommodates the present legacy of New American Radio by gathering data on projects, performances, composers, musicians and software tools related with emerging networked musical explorations made possible by computers, the Internet and mobile technologies.

Edmonds is currently Professor of Computation and Creative Media in the Faculty of IT at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Director of the Creativity and Cognition Studios (CCS). The origins of CCS derived from his unique research, which spawned a conference series under the similar title of Creativity and Cognitions. A regular headliner from 1993 onwards on the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCHI calendar, concepts explored in these meetings developed into an artist-in-residency program (COSTART) at Loughborough University (UK) from 1996 before CCS was established in its present location at UTS in 2003.

The Digital Artists Handbook is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art.

The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies.

When discussing software, the focus of this Handbook is on Free/Libre Open Source Software. The Handbook aims to give artists information about the available tools but also about the practicalities related to Free Software and Open Content, such as collaborative development and licenses. All this to facilitate exchange between artists, to take away some of the fears when it comes to open content licenses, sharing code, and to give a perspective on various ways of working and collaborating.

download the Digital Artists Handbook pdf.

Operating nationally and globally for two decades, ANAT has been delivering initiatives which enable connection, collaboration, research and development, fostering enterprise, sustainability, dialogue and exchange across art, culture, science and technology.

By creating opportunities for enrichment & inspiration, ANAT supports emerging and established artists in the fields of media and hybrid arts, networked and distributed practices, sound and performance to develop new concepts and work. The majority of Australia’s prominent media artists, curators and producers have benefited from ANAT’s innovative programs.

ANAT collaborates with science, industry and arts partners within Australia and overseas to initiate opportunities including immersive residencies, databases and emerging technology labs. ANAT also provides quick response competitive grants to assist Australian practitioners to take up professional development opportunities worldwide.