I love this image by artist / photographer / designer Alia Penner. Her images evoke a surreal dreamland that is visually compelling and makes me want to get out my scissors and gluestick.

Time for collage night, I'm calling my friends ~

Graduate students in the UCSC Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) program and the UCSC Arts + Physics Research Lab (APRL) have been working collaboratively with sonicSENSE to develop and create the design, content, and conceptual framework of the interactive art exhibition. TRANSMUTATIONS: Opening Reception: Date: March 26, 2011 Time: 7pm -12am ... New GAFFTA Location: 998 Market Street @ Taylor St San Francisco, CA 94102 Exhibition Open hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4pm-7pm Exhibition Description: TRANSMUTATIONS by sonicSENSE at GAFFTA is a site-specific information ecology, consisting of a complex series of sound sculptures, machines, video projections and sensors. Two systems drive this project: user interaction and data visualizations. User interactivity produces a wide range of soundscapes, data projections and mechanical sounds that collect and distribute media into the exhibition space. Data content for TRANSMUTATIONS consists of, data parsed from auscultation libraries, audio from the California Library of Natural Sounds at the Oakland Museum of California, data collected from the UCSC Arts and Physics Lab and on-site data in the gallery space. By taking data out of archives, pie charts and graphs and giving it a physical form through sculptural, audio and visual means, we aim to build a compelling experience synthesizing scientific research with new media as a method of engaging community participation. We believe in the concept of learning by doing, that material exploration is an important part of the understanding process and that explaining through tangible tools, where people can actually touch, explore and play with information, is essential to collaborative communication and visual thinking. TRANSMUTATIONS is the most recent iteration of the sonicSENSE platform created by Barney Haynes and Jennifer Parker in collaboration with Mechatronics graduate students in the Digital Art New Media program and the Arts + Physics Lab at the University of California Santa Cruz.SonicSENSE created by Barney Haynes and Jennifer Parker in 2008, is an expandable and evolving site for art, culture, new technologies, digital media, collaboration, and participation. SonicSENSE uses the creative diversity of computational media and traditional visual art practices to cultivate space for sharing, questioning, and exploring interdisciplinary frameworks, methodologies, and experiences. Each exhibition of the platform is a new iteration consisting including artists, composers, scientists and programmers. With support from UCSC Arts Research Institute, UC Institute on Research in the Arts, California College of the Arts, The Oakland Museum of California, and UCSC OpenLab Network.See More

Review of Gallery Extraña artist / curator Aimee Friberg's show with Tabitha Soren at Branch Gallery

Staff Pick

Dreamtime

The New Young, Aimee Friberg, 22 x 16, archival inkjet print, 2009

Through April 1

Originally, Dreamtime referred to Australian aborigines' notion of Creation: the descent of totemic beings from spiritual realms into plants, animals, and humans tasked with maintaining the cosmos through ritual song, dance, and art. East Bay photographers Aimée Friberg and Tabitha Soren explore a contemporary vision of art as dream with their fragmentary, softly focused views of poetic subject matter: cinematic images that hint at mysterious narratives à la Cindy Sherman and Ralph Gibson. Friberg's views of water and trees ("This Autumn I Swam"), foggy landscapes, horse's haunches ("The New Young"), and decollated factory worker ("Shipyard February [From Lost Film Stills]"), and Soren's nocturnes, either unpopulated ("You Come to Mind") or featuring enigmatic activities ("You Call That Dark?"), posit a universe that is radiantly beautiful even if no spiritual authority spills the esoteric beans for us. Dreamtime runs through April 1 at Branch Gallery (455 17th St., Oakland). 415-577-7537 or Branch.Bayvan.org.

— DeWitt Cheng

Branch Gallery

• 455 17th St. Ste #301

Call for submissions: Photo and Cinema

Noorderlicht Photofestival 2011, The Netherlands

METROPOLIS, City Life in the Urban Age
Deadline: 31 March, 2011

11 September through 9 October 2011, Groningen
opening on 10 September

"On May 23, 2007 the world celebrated the beginning of the urban millennium. It was on this date that, worldwide, for the first time in history more people lived in cities than in the countryside: 3.3 billion people, on 3 percent of the earth's surface. This development has far-reaching implications. Is a decent, humane life possible in a modern megalopolis that is bursting at its seams? And how can the countryside survive the economic, demographic, cultural and ecological clear-fell that urbanisation brings with it?"

The main exhibition of the Noorderlicht Photofestival 2011, METROPOLIS, City Life in the Urban Age, deals with the role of the city as the nerve centre of modern global society.
It is the second part of a diptych, a follow-up to the 2010 theme LAND, Country Life in the Urban Age, which looked at the shrinking role of the countryside worldwide.
The city, as a phenomenon, has an almost schizophrenic character; its many personalities are constantly encountering one another. It is our intention that these multiple personalities will emerge in the structure of the exhibition, running the gamut from utopia to dystopia.

Call for submissions
Noorderlicht calls on photographers, curators and photo agencies to submit work or proposals for METROPOLIS, City Life in the Urban Age.
Deadline for submitting is 31 March, 2011. Please read our conditions and technical details first.- http://www.noorderlicht.com/en/photofestival/submitting-for-the-2011-photofestival/

We are looking for photo series that present a distinctive, even idiosyncratic vision on the character of the modern city. Economic, social or urban planning aspects can each play a role; the series may be literal or metaphorical. We are striving for a global picture; the group exhibition as a whole will be a journey through cities in all parts of the world.
The precise sub-themes will be set out in a following stage of the project. We list several possibilities as examples:

Symphony: The city as the effervescent economic and social nerve centre of modern society, a place for progress, interaction and infinite possibilities;
Mutability: Space that is the product of urban planning, with architectonic dreams of the good life for all the city's inhabitants; from old ideals of equality to modern technology and sustainability;
Expansion: The urge for unbridled expansion in the name of progress, creating new chances but also pushing the old into oblivion; a place of migration, on the way to a better future, even if that means a life in the chaos of the slums;
Seduction: Where massive economic differences exist and everyone is seduced by a mass media landscape to seek greater wealth, where millionaires live next to the homeless;
Fear: Places where the individual can be swamped in a mass of strangers; where the demands of the rat race for success stand in the way of authentic living; where criminality lurks, security demands control and Big Brother is always watching;
Home: Small societies, seeking a place of one’s own in the large, anonymous world around one, or the excessive separation from that wider world; the creation of suburbs where affluent urban life can again appear rural; the shift of the social environment from the real to the virtual world.

Deadline for submitting is 31 March, 2011. Please read our conditions and technical details first. - http://www.noorderlicht.com/en/photofestival/submitting-for-the-2011-photofestival/

Tips from colleagues are also very welcome. Do not however wait too long; the curatorial process begins as soon as work comes in.

We are using a special email address for submissions: pandora@noorderlicht.com. Our ftp server is also open at all times.

Correspondence regarding the theme can be sent directly to the curator Wim Melis, at his email address: wim@noorderlicht.com.

Noorderlicht Photography Akerkhof 12 9711 JB Groningen The Netherlands
http://www.noorderlicht.com/en/