In response to Artreviews community announcement of user content censorship on the 6th of September I have created an online petition to gauge interest in how the community (and generally artists who use the internet) feel about this. To read the full details of the announcement email and sign the petition point your browser to:

Please forward this announcement to lists, family, friends, colleagues etc.

A protest forum thread has also started on the Artreview site called AUTHORIZED NAKED where users are being encouraged to add images of their own art which includes nakedness. Ownership of the work and it’s rights is crucial authorising artists to be naked as personal choice and effectively giving Artreview more content to censor.

A selection of some drawn networks of various types by Norwegian artist Torgeir Husevaag.

Network of People (image above) is a rendering of people encountered by the artists during a week.

During a week in November 1996, I took notes about all forms of contact I had with other people (name, time, place, duration etc). This was an attempt to investigate and visualise to what extent a persons private history is a part of his present life and personal network. The people I met in the research-week became the “1st generation informers”. They are represented with a name in an red oval in the drawing. Most of these 104 encounters of the “present” could refer to other associates of mine. These relations (named by the 1st gen. Informers), were added to the drawing (orange oval) according to a cronology. I stopped the investigation there, although The 2nd generation informers could have refered to a third one, etc…

Poker-drawings I and II (image above and below).

These pen and ink drawings were transcriptions of poker-tournaments played online, with myself as a participant. Each players actions is shown as a series of specific symbols, while the players involved in each hand is connected with lines. The two series employ the same set of symbols, but arrange them differently.

Antimatter (image above).

The map is a network of two hundred Norwegian companies/ organizations core values. I have replaced all the words representing the values with antonyms (the opposite of synonyms).

Originally seen on Serial Consign.

REFF – Remix the world! Reinvent reality! opened last Friday (25/02/11) at Furtherfield Gallery in London and runs until Saturday 26th of March 2011 (images below). I performed Trav—erse at the opening (image above of setup) to a packed gallery (don’t be fooled by the empty photos taken before the opening). Good to perform somewhere where both the audience and myself are in the same location (lots of mixed reality work recently) – feedback seemed positive.

The REFF show is part of the launch/publicity/awareness raising of the book published last November and forms part of a whole series of events in London this month – see the Art is Open Source website for more details.

Over the next month I’ll be involved in quite a few things Second Life related. The first of these is happening next Wednesday (04/08/10) at 9:30pm GMT (1:30pm Second Life Time) as part of the 2010 Odyssey Performance Art Festival running from today (31/07/10) until the 10/08/10.

The performance (image above) will take place at Odyssey Art and Performance Simu. Documentation of previous performances are online here.

For full details of the schedule for the complete festival, see the Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance weblog.

What follows is a chronology of telephony performances by Robert Whitman.

In 1972 Whitman produced his first telephone/radio piece, NEWS. Participants were provided with coins and sent to particular pay phones in Manhattan. Each person moved from phone to phone, reporting about what they saw and the resulting audio was mixed by Whitman and broadcast live on WBAI radio.

Over the next two years, NEWS was also performed in Houston, Texas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and other cities.

Cell Phone Performance (image above) by Robert Whitman performed in 2002, Leeds, England is an updated performance of his 1972 performance, News. This time performers were provided with cell phones to call in reports of their location and what they observed. More than simply a re-enactment of the performance with updated technology, use of cell phones allowed participants to explore their location more freely and to report while on the go.

Local Report (images above), the third and most recent series of performances occurred in 2005. Once again participants employed cell phones but this time to shoot video clips which were sent on to the artist to be mixed both visually and aurally.