http://www.vimeo.com/9696981

21st of february I joined in the Share jam to try out some new visual material from my visual culture+lifestyle design/art-project which I named Alter Modern Times. The title is inspired by Nicolas Bourriauds´s bookAltermodern (Tate Publishing, 2009) and by Charlie Chaplin´s film Modern Times (1937). It is a journal based art project (video /sound /graphics /photography), which sprung out of the idea of what energies displacement creates, thoughts on what´s next after postmodernism and a will to explore and invent alternatives to the 9-5-lifestyle

This citation from the foreword of Altermodern pretty much sums up the base of my project. ”Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This ‘reloading process’ of modernism according to the twenty-first-century issues could be called altermodernism, a movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world.  /- - -/.

Under the threat from fundamentalism and consumer-driven uniformisation, menaced by massification and the enforced re-abandonment of individual identity, art today needs to reinvent itself, and on a planetary scale. /- - -/ It is neither a petrified kind of time advancing in loops (postmodernism) nor a linear vision of history (modernism), but a positive experience of disorientation through an art-form exploring all dimensions of the present, tracing lines in all directions of time and space. The artist turns cultural nomad: what remains of the Baudelarian model of modernism is no doubt this flânerie, transformed into a technique for generating creativeness and deriving knowledge.”

Alter Modern Times audio visual performance:

#01 Share, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, New York 21 february
#02 O-Space, One Arm Red, Brooklyn, New York 04 mars
#03 Share, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, New York 16 mars
#04 San Francisco, California, TBA
#05 Ulstrup Castle, Aarhus, Denmark 16-17 april
#06 Volt Festival, Uppsala, Sweden 5 june
#07 Berlin, Germany, TBA

More posts on this soon!

Facebook invite here!

Photo: Ricardo Fernandez

More info:

http://www.share.dj - click New York

http:// …Alter Modern Times - project website up soon

I would like to recommend The Dreamfactory! This event takes place in Stockholm 23-25 of April and is organised by The Swedish Film Institute.

There is going to be for example film screenings by students at The Dramatiska Institutet and The University College for Film and Mattias Bergbom, working in Hollywood will tell us about his visual effects! And lots of other things! More information, click: http://www.sfi.se/dromfabriken

This link has been spreading through Create Digital Motion and VJ Forums. It’s a manifest directed to people hiring VJs and deals with what you should think about to make your VJ happy and get as much out of the performance as possible. The author of the manifest is the New York based VJ Zarah Cabañas aka “Lady Firefly”.

Respect Your VJ
About Respect Your VJ and Lady Firefly on CRM

Last spring me and Hinke Berggren did a VJ demo and discussion at the Interactive Institute in connection to the kick start of Arvid Engström’s project “Mobile Collaborative Live Video Production”. Dejakru has also been involved when Arvid later did interviews with VJs regarding how we work in live situations.

The first reports are now available for download. In the big main report, Engström investigates how VJs work, how teenagers use their cellphone cameras and how to build an application that will let you mix live video from cellphones in a VJ fashion. The application goes under the name “SwarmCam” (an earlier name was “WeJ”). After a pause in the project they are now back up and running and we are hoping to see some samples this spring.

For you theory heads out there the report is up for download in pdf-format from this link.

You can find more reports from Arvid Engström here.

Ana and Brendan from VJ Theory asked us to spread this through our network. The book that is printed on the print-on-demand service Lulu costs only $13.70 and is available for downlowd for $5.44. You can also read the text for free at VJ Theory’s homepage.

+ Updates from VJ Theory project ++

VJ Theory.net intends to develop a community actively discussing and reflecting on philosophy and theory related with Vjing, performed media and realtime interaction.

1- VJAM THEORY

At last the book VJam Theory: Collective Writings on Realtime Visual Performance is ready and available for purchase. For those of you who don’t know, the book is the outcome of our third experiment in collective theoretical writing, VJam Theory. You will find on the website the necessary information to buy the book online: http://www.vjtheory.net/realtime_books/vjam_theory.htm
The original transcript will continue to be available at VJ Theory website for free: http://www.vjtheory.net/vjamtheory.html

2- UPCOMING PUBLICATIONS ON THE WEBSITE

VJ Theory will be publishing new texts online on a monthly basis, through a period between October 2008 and March 2009. At the end of this period, realtime books will publish a print version of these texts (as many people have requested). We are also attempting to make the site less Anglo-Americocentric. We will be publishing non English versions of the texts (whenever possible), in order to make the site multilingual. Should you have a text that you would like us to publish please get in touch. If anyone would like to translate some work we would also like to hear from you.
Our email address: vjtheory[at]yahoo[dot]co.uk

3- MAILING LIST

We are also establishing a mailing list. Instructions on subscribing are available on the first page of VJ Theory web site (http://www.vjtheory.net).
In this way you will be kept up to date on new work appearing online, events and discussions on and off line.
As usual, should you have any suggestions for projects or essays you would like us to publish then please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Best Regards,
Ana and Brendan