V's blog

Calling all artists to the Unintended Uses show in collaboration with the Nexus foundation

NEXUS/foundation for today's art in Philadelphia, in conjunction with The Hacktory, is seeking submissions for "Unintended Uses," an exhibition of hacked and repurposed materials scheduled for February 12 through March 6, 2009. Artists and makers working with electronics,  video, robotics, and other new media, and particularly those who reside on the East Coast,  are encouraged to submit work for review.

"Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world are produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. While hackers create these new worlds, we do not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce - it owns us."

-- from "A Hacker Manifesto" by McKenzie Wark
 

Deadline: December 1, 2008 by 11:59 PM
Notification: On or around December 15, 2008
Submissions via E-MAIL ONLY


Required content of your E-mail submission:

Hacktory offers geek-friendly classes

The Temple News wrote a nice article about us, featuring the profound hacker philosophical musing of one of our fearless founders, Far.

“If Philadelphia were bigger, better, more organized or had more money, things would be too organized. People wouldn’t be interested in latching on to a new idea because there’d be existing systems that already worked,” McKon said. “If Philadelphia sucked any more, you couldn’t get things going because it would be absolutely too chaotic.”

Click here for more, much more.

ROBOT250 -- 250 invade robots in Pittsburgh

Hobbyists in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute created 250 robots for Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary.

Here is the link to the project

And here is the video accompanying today's WSJ article:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY INDYHALL

IndyHall is what we all want to be when we grow up. And, how fast IndyHall grew up in only one year. HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY.

Click here for a video of Alex Hillman with the details of the event.

Time: Sunday, August 31st, 6pm.
Place: Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Old City Philadelphia

The Hacktory contributed $200 to the party fund. Please chip in yourself. Click here to chip in.

louder 'Verdensteatret'

One of Europe's most innovative contemporary arts groups, Oslo-based Verdensteatret will bring audiences into a highly experimental audiovisual installation that goes far beyond the boundaries of conventional performance. Last winter, Verdensteatret sailed up the Mekong Delta, the same river that plays the veins and arteries around the heart of darkness in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Inspired by their journey, louder is a symphonic collage of music and visual art: massive video projections of the Vietnamese countryside play as Soviet-era megaphones hurl sound in all directions. Gaping puppet jaws chase flocks of small metal figures across the room. An enormous mechanical spider looms over the scene. Verdensteatret uses sculptural scenography, mesmerizing generators of sound, and technological relics of a bygone era to create a spectacular universe that unites concert, art, and theate.

GEOMETRY at FLUXspace opens this Saturday

GEOMETRY

The home computer and Internet connectivity has contributed greatly towards a more connected and accessible visual world. A person from one terminal can see the Earth from space, view the building blocks of atoms or even watch a web cam sunset from Fiji. The Internet has enabled us to see our world from a vast number of perspectives through a vast number of technologies. We sometimes forget that the visual world is composed and also based around Geometry.