There's something about 09 that seems very different from 08. It may be the New President (isn't he charming?) or maybe it's just the light, but somehow I feel I'm back on course to do something useful this year. Events in planning:
Paralelo - How Media Artists and Designers are working with Science and Technology to engage with Environmental and Ecological Concerns (in Sao Paulo, at Museum of Image and Sound, 29th March-2nd April 2009).
Digital Culture in Brazil - A Cultural Mapping Document: co-authored with Felipe Fonseca and commissioned by SICA for the Dutch Ministry of Culture, to be published in the Netherlands in March 2008
Two essays - one on 'The Laboratory as Network' and the other on 'Mapping Digital Culture in Brazil' for a new publication from the Virtueel Platform to be published spring 2009
Participation in workshop on the Economy of Contribution at Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, with Scott Lash, Director of Centre, Bernhard Stiegler, Paris media philosopher, and others - 10th/11th February
'Learning to see to learn: from bees to machines' - a seminar at Imperial College programmed for IDE at RCA, on 24th February at 6.30 pm with speakers Beau Lotto from lottolab UCL and Professor Stephen Gage, from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
and - first off - Sunday 1st February, at the House of World Cultures in Berlin - Houses of Happiness Brico-Brunch, with the DesCentro Network and others .....climax to Transmediale 09, see you there?
http://www.transmediale.de

It's time to begin, even in the States - we're there, 2009. I've been choosing a text for Proboscis from Project Gutenberg responding to an invite to contribute to their e-book series which is a typically joyful and thoughtful initiative from Giles Lane and Alice Angus, see http://diffusion.org.uk/?page_id=3
My choice of text is Stephane Mallarme's version of Edgar Allan Poe's dream-poem The Raven (Le Corbeau) with illustrations by Edouard Manet.http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14082/14082-h/14082-h.htm,
I have chosen Mallarme for his intelligent work in the dissolution of poetic form that has been playing out till now in the twenty first century. This was form as code well before the arrival of software and hypertext well before dreamweaver. His singular experiments which beautifully combine abstraction with performativity appear ever more significant over time as we look today at the emergence of software code and machine language as drivers of 21st cutural expression. His experiments with form exploring and revealing underlying latencies may be seen as a linguistic and poetic decoding. These were exciting developments that led directly to many of the most important aesthetic and cultural innovations of the 20th century and preceded the emergence, in particular, of serialism, concretism and forms of machine/computer art. We trace these experiments into process-based and open works of the 60s including Computerized Haiku, computer poetry devised by Margaret Masterman (with Robin McKinnon-Wood) of the Cambridge Language Research Unit as well as earlier tense exchanges between Boulez and Cage on the importance or otherwise of chance in composition and performance.
More about proboscis at www.proboscis.org.uk