If you think the global financial crisis is bad, think again. The looming environmental collapse associated with global warming will make the current depression in global greed seem like child's play.

Earth Hour 2009 aims to give a voice to all people across the globe and invites everyone to participate in the creation of a stunning and vivid image of our home planet with its lights turnedd off. Be part of the message!

VOTE EARTH!!!
Saturday, March 28, 8:30-9:30pm.

Switch off your lights (and everything else for that matter: tv, radio, ipod, and yes, your computer, too) for just one hour, enjoy the silence, do something in the dark (ideally something that raises our collective consciousness, the choice is yours ... ), and join the world for Earth Hour.

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace."
Jimi Hendrix

From July 17th until August 30th, 2008, the Sonic Self is bringing together local and international sound artists, musicians, video/multimedia and performance artists to facilitate the exchange and development of pioneering ideas, innovative skills and practices in contemporary Sound Art discipline.

The Sonic Self- a sound-art related exhibition aims at developing an open and direct audio-visual dialog between video and sound artists in order to expose significant similarities and differences in the growing confluence of audio and visual experiences in the emerging Sonic Culture, where; communication, sound and visual experience merge as significant pattern in the cultural sensibility towards sound and the surrounding persistent, random audio architecture a kind of sonic explosion that can be seen as a breakthrough of the Sonic Itself.

The Sonic world (an audible space); an emerging intersection between the audio and visual experiences, based on increasing internet and digital technology inventions -- gave the sound a significant stage in the surrounding environment in the multimedia environment of contemporary culture then ever before.

Personal homepages and other online presentations offer a new medium in which to define, construct, and express personal identity. The collections and arrangments of text, image, audio and video files that make up a homepage present a bricolage of bits and pieces that reveals (and hides) various aspects of a person’s identity.

And, just as any other articulated construction of personal identity, a personal homepage is essentially a construction – the frequent under construction sign is indicative of the ad hoc, improvised nature of a constructed identity presented in an asynchronous medium. It further reflects the constitutive element of a concrete identity as the interplay and tension between change and continuity.

In her article, Karyn Y. Lu offers an innovative and insightful examination of the role and function of visual identity in virtual communities and networked social settings.

Screening Circle is a new collaborative media artwork by Andy Deck. The piece adapts the cultural tradition of the quilting circle and the participative round table into an online format for producing motion graphics.

Visitors to the site can enter a drawing area to compose loops of graphics. Each person affects and edits each other's screens. In the screening areas, the resulting motion graphics and retrospective footage are on view instantaneously and archived for posterity.

Screening Circle, as Deck explains on the site, was inspired by the tradition of the quilting circle: a group of people who make a quilt together, each producing small squares that are later sewn together.

Screening Circle reinterprets this popular craft tradition in the context of interactive electronic media. As you draw in this circle you may notice icons changing, because other people are drawing at the same time.

"Peace starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace with neighboring communities."

His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama,
1989 Nobel Laureate for Peace

The Missing Peace is a multi-media art exhibition that brings together over 75 well-respected artists, representing more than 25 countries. With the full life of the Dalai Lama as inspiration, the intention for this project is to shift the world's attention towards peace.

The exhibition will be seen in cities around the world starting in the spring of 2006. Participating artists include: Richard Avedon, Ken Aptekar, Laurie Anderson, Guy Buffet, Michael Rovner, Adam Fuss, Jenny Holzer, Katarina Wong and Bill Viola.

Few things are changing as rapidly and dramatically as the Internet. A recent Pew Foundation sponsored study shows that the global use of digital networks continues to grow at an amazing pace.

The study offers some interesting insights, especially in comparison to the Elon University / Pew Foundation project Imagining the Internet: A History and a Forecast, which aims to map the social, cultural, economic, and technical evolution of networked communication systems in an attempt to chart how the accelerating impact of these technologies will change our lives and our world.

Here a few anonymous quotes from participants in the history and forecast surveys:

An intriguing mixture of urban anthropology and behavioral psychology, Dr. Hugo Heyrman's online selection of short video loops offers a glimpse on the complexities of human behaviour and interactions.

The work combines the elements of a virtual siteseeing tour exploring the streets of Antwerp, Netherlands, with the aesthetics of choppy motion loops -- micro shorts, as Dr.Hugo calls them. The online work is part of Dr.Hugo's Museums of the Mind

Software Architecture and Plato's Ideal Types: How Minds Store and Use Symbols

by Francis Hsu

Introduction

Human language is the first software. Software began when humans first used their minds and language to express themselves and communicate. This natural software, however, is still little understood. This essay establishes that the abstractions which human language allows enabled Plato to pose a question which still haunts us today.

A review by H-Ray Heine

The dawn of a new age of cosmetic surgery is here. The combination of advanced surgical procedures and genetically engineered tissue and body parts opens up the gates to a virtual nirvana for sexual Frankenfreaks.

Human Upgrades, an (unfortunately) anonymous website, offers a fascinating and chilling preview of the future in the form of a slick, Flash driven online brochure promoting the services of a high-tech beauty farm that specializes in such exotic and intriguing products as the "multi-nipple" and the ever popular "palmclit" -- sure to be bestsellers in this coming market of advanced body manipulations.

A review by H-Ray Heine

Jonathan Harris' interactive Flash work combines online news from science websites and blogs with an interface that utilizes the Fibonacci series and Brownian motion algorithms.

The result is an intriguing media work that transforms itself with evolving news stories, which it collects on the web and integrates into its own structure.

In his work, Harris juxtaposes the areas of science and culture, and suggests that each area would benefit from a harmonious synergy.