Archive for October, 2007

Coming To & The Chalk Vision Project

October 18th, 2007 by Tegan

Today Athena Mazarakis of the Performing Arts Department at the Wits School of Arts and I (Tegan Bristow) of the Digital Arts Department  presented as a Diva Talk the products of our collaborations. This began earlier this year in which Athena asked me to create digital and video interactions for her solo performance Coming To which led to the creation of my Chalk Vision Project parts of which will be showing at the Spier Contemporary this December.  This was a great presentation allowing Athena and I to really celebrate our collaborations and the ease with which we work together.

Pippa Tshabalala will be writing an article on the presentation for Upgrade and she will be posting it here too.
So if you are interested in knowing more keep a look out for it in the next week.

Upgrade! Johannesburg and WSOA Digital Soiree event – 19 October 2007 – Poesysteme

October 18th, 2007 by Pippa

Upgrade! Johannesburg and Wits School of Arts Digital Soiree are proud to present: POESYSTEME.

French-Argentinian game design student Balthazar Auger will be presenting his art game POESYSTEME, via live audio link from Angouleme, France. Poesysteme is a poetry based game which deals with the manipulation of language. Tegan Bristow, lecturer in Interactive Media at WSOA Digital Arts, will be writing an essay on the event, so check back later for more!

The Digital Soiree
Friday 19 October 15:00 – 17:00
Convent Seminar Room
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg
All Welcome!

For more information on his current project, check out Balthazar’s blog

Sex, Second Life and Videogames…

October 15th, 2007 by Pippa

I was sent a link recently by a friend to Sexblo.gs This website is about sex in most forms of media and popular culture, including advertising, art, and my personal favourite – video games….

What I thought was particularly interesting was the most recent entry on ‘Broadly Offensive’ sexual behaviour in Second Life. Since I don’t want to give too much away on a blog such as @joburg, check it out here if you’re interested…. Of course the discussion doesn’t only circumnavigate Second Life but also deals with, amongst others, 8-bit Atari porn, voyeurism, ‘roleplaying’ and cyber-sex in Warcraft (which is quite hysterical), as well as Pixelporn and Sex Tetris.

If nothing else it’s worth a look for the laughs!

Digital Surrogates

October 8th, 2007 by Pippa

New works by:
International collaborative, Eva and Franco Mattes
Bronwyn Miller and
Pippa Stalker

Digital Surrogates brings together four artists from across the globe who blur the line between digital interactive media and the fine arts. The show will feature five large digital portraits from a series entitled “13 Most Beautiful Avatars” by Eva and Franco Mattes alongside paintings by Bronwyn Millar and photographs by Pippa Stalker. Together this work translates persuasively into an analysis of self, public perception and possibility.

Eva and Franco Mattes, also known in techie circles as 0100101110101101.org are internationally recognised as supreme interventionists. Most of their projects involve different forms of media hacking and bogus culture trafficking. In one instance the duo temporarily hijacked the Nike logo for a public installation in Vienna. In another, they created an entirely fictional artist, only to murder him once he was sufficiently famous. Here, they have made a series of dramatic portraits of avatars created on Second Life with New York printmaker, Jean-Yves Noblet. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world wherein one can build an alter-ego or avatar to meet with others, be entertained, buy land even trade real-life products.

Bronwyn Millar will be showing paintings of a new avatar, created in preparation for the show with a photographic, animated portrait of her ideal self. Through her examination of the subversive nature of art games, Stalker has created a photographic body of work documenting the hundreds of characters she has killed within the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The event will be opened by Tegan Bristow.
We encourage you to come and experience this event at David Krut Projects.

Opening 11 Oct at 6pm