Blogs Media Lab

Spark Festival at the University of Minnesota

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A new call for new media art, video work and sound from the Spark Festival. There are several categories of submission, most of them revolve around music. Also there is the opportunity to publish scholarly papers about new media art in a festival publication. MUSIC SUBMISSIONS Music submissions will be accepted in four categories: 1. [...]

A new call for new media art, video work and sound from the Spark Festival. There are several categories of submission, most of them revolve around music. Also there is the opportunity to publish scholarly papers about new media art in a festival publication.

MUSIC SUBMISSIONS

Music submissions will be accepted in four categories:

1. Concert works: Electroacoustic works with and without performers. Performance venues will accommodate 2-8 channel works and works with video. Although there is no strict limit of duration, pieces of fifteen minutes or less are encouraged. Note that Spark 2006 will feature guest performers Maja Cerar (violin) and Brian Sacawa (saxophone). Works written for solo violin and solo saxophone with digital music and/or images are especially welcome. Other instruments will be available, and details on available performing forces will be posted on the Spark website with the submission forms.

2. “Club” works: Experimental electronic performances in a “club-style” venue. Performers of various styles will be considered, including those influenced by IDM, hip-hop, glitch, jazz, and etc. Selected performers will be given sets of 15-30 minutes. Performance venue will accommodate stereo sound and video.

3. Installations: [See "Art Works" below]

4. Music with video [See “ Art Works” below]

ART WORKS

Submissions will be accepted in three categories:

1. Installations and gallery works: A number of installation and gallery exhibitions will be mounted in various spaces on the UMN campus, including the Weisman Art Museum. Please include technical and space requirements with submission. Installations may be physical objects, video and/or sound projections, or combinations thereof. Artists may be required to provide some or all of necessary technology to mount installations.

2. Radio: Spark Radio is a new addition for the 2006 festival, initiated and curated by Abinadi Meza, a Minneapolis-based artist. Submissions for Spark Radio may include sound art, samplism, field recordings, turntablism, pirate radio, sonic deconstructions, and other transmissions. Please submit on CD or CD-ROM.

3. Video: Experimental video works will be screened at multiple Spark events. Videos featuring digital music compositions (two-channel or Dolby 5.1) are welcome, but this is not required. Although there is no strict limit of duration, pieces of twelve minutes or less are encouraged. Please submit on DVD or VHS (NTSC).

4. Theater/Dance: A number of theatrical and dance works incorporating new technologies will be programmed at Spark 2006, with a special interest in shorter works that can be integrated into programs with music and video works. In addition, although not confirmed as of this writing, we hope to produce at least one performance in a dance theater with video projection and an Internet 2 connection. Please include performance venue and technical requirements with submissions.

Stand Alone IE

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I realize this is old news but I just had someone ask me about it so I guess not everyone knows. The standard install of Internet Explorer on Windows will only let you have one version on your machine. Meaning if you have IE 6 you can not test with IE 5. There is stand [...]

I realize this is old news but I just had someone ask me about it so I guess not everyone knows. The standard install of Internet Explorer on Windows will only let you have one version on your machine. Meaning if you have IE 6 you can not test with IE 5. There is stand alone browser you can download and use for testing. The best place I’ve found to get it is on the evolt browser archive

Off Center

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We felt our previous focus on blogs devoted to specific departments was interesting but possibly it left out people on the Walker team who had valuable things to say. So we made a “catch all blog” for everyone who is not a part of another blog but would still like to post about contemporary art [...]

We felt our previous focus on blogs devoted to specific departments was interesting but possibly it left out people on the Walker team who had valuable things to say. So we made a “catch all blog” for everyone who is not a part of another blog but would still like to post about contemporary art or the non-profit/arts/creative community. Look for outside ideas from inside the walker to be posted there.

Upgrade complete

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The blogging software upgrade has been completed – actually several upgrades in one: by the time I’d finished the upgrade to 1.5.1.3 there was a new version released! So I waited to push everything out until I could get 1.5.2 installed – two upgrades for the price of one. And it’s actually even better than [...]

The blogging software upgrade has been completed – actually several upgrades in one: by the time I’d finished the upgrade to 1.5.1.3 there was a new version released! So I waited to push everything out until I could get 1.5.2 installed – two upgrades for the price of one.

And it’s actually even better than that: we’re running a single install of WordPress with each individual blog linked to that source (and some cleverness in config.php to determine which database to use) – so one source update upgrades all our blogs. Now in the 1.5 branch we can finally start using the WP Themes structure to lay out and style the blogs, instead of major hackery with CSS files by Eric. Much nicer for everyone.

We’re coming from the 1.2 branch, so this was a fairly big upgrade, please keep us posted if anything looks off or weird. Features to look for include a creator tag in the RSS feeds (so you can see who wrote it without clicking through), improved CAPTCHA spam protection, and numerous improvements on the admin side that most of you won’t actually see. But trust me, it’s better. :)

Design Site

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I guess it has been officially launched for a little while but we have added a site for the Design department in the same template that we used for Visual Arts, Film Video and Performing Arts. I’d particularly point out the Articles section has some interesting reads in it.

I guess it has been officially launched for a little while but we have added a site for the Design department in the same template that we used for Visual Arts, Film Video and Performing Arts.

I’d particularly point out the Articles section has some interesting reads in it.

Blog Update + New Anti-Spam

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We are updating the blog installation here to the newest version of WordPress. It’s a little behind but we are running all our blogs from one WordPress install so things take a bit longer to update. A few hours of updates and we are ready to go, everything seems fine on our test server so [...]

We are updating the blog installation here to the newest version of WordPress. It’s a little behind but we are running all our blogs from one WordPress install so things take a bit longer to update. A few hours of updates and we are ready to go, everything seems fine on our test server so tomorrow you should be seeing all this in WP 1.5. The only thing on the front end that looks very different is the authorization image we are using (the image with a code you must enter before you can post a comment).

We are currently using authImage to stop comment spam bots and it got a pretty hefty update for the new version. It used to generate images that looked like this:

Obviously that font was kind of ugly but it doesn’t look to clash on most of our pages. I kept meaning to change it to something more “Walker” but I’m glad I didn’t because the new version is really crazy (in a bad way i think). At it’s best the new version looks like this:

but often it looks worse, like:

It is actually hard for me to read the last one the distortion is so severe.

I started reading up on PWNtcha, a script that breaks authorization images and now I see why they changed it. Still I would like something a little less ugly on our pages so I’m currently digging through the WordPress Reference on the subject to see if I can find something that does the job just as well.

** UPDATE **

Actually the Auth Image plugin is very modifiable. I started using some of our custom fonts, a set of Walker images and i toned down the filter. It is not as unbreakable as the original AuthImage but I think it will work fine for us. New authentication images look like this:

Table Down! Now it’s back.

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We had a mini crisis here in NMI with our Dialog Table. The computer had a melt down. We got the call at around 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and Nate our webmaster set out trying to diagnose it. The table is back up and running now, there are complete details after the jump.

We had a mini crisis here in NMI with our Dialog Table. The computer had a melt down. We got the call at around 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and Nate our webmaster set out trying to diagnose it.

The table is back up and running now, there are complete details after the jump.

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