March 26, 2009

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Version at a reception on Thursday, April 2, at the gallery@Calit2, located in Atkinson Hall on the UCSD campus.  The reception will include a presentation on the history and development of Version.

Thursday, April 2, 5 - 7 p.m.
gallery@Calit2, Atkinson Hall, UCSD Main Campus

For directions please visit: gallery@Calit2 

March 10, 2009

Announcing the launch of the new online journal Version with contributions by Benjamin Bratton, Alphonso Lingis, Masao Miyoshi, Allen Shelton, Lesley Stern, Kathleen Stewart, Michael Taussig, and John Welchman.

Version is an online journal for short-form writing and media work. It presents scenes, incidents, encounters, and sensory experiences drawn from everyday life, in which concepts are not only elaborated but enacted.

Version works in close-up, cultivating moods, atmospheres, and various forms of bodily apprehension and awareness. It aims for a quality of intimacy, presence, and affective charge: a material openness to unexpected forms of encounter. At the same time, it works laterally, conducting transversal operations across object-boundaries, attuned to the rhythms, flows, and layered ecologies that constitute the phenomenal world.

Each Version editorial item adheres to the following formal constraint: a maximum of 500 words, 5 images, or 50 seconds.

With its formal and rhetorical approach, Version embodies new patterns of readership and network-enabled economies of attention, which can involve time-constrained multitasking and transversal readings across media venues. It spans specialized discourses, genre categories, and disciplinary divides, while encouraging the reception, rearrangement and redistribution of its material in new social networks and assemblages. It is less a bounded publication than an editorial ecology -- a dynamic system through which unexpected editorial properties and forms can emerge.

To sign up for our mailing list to receive news, announcements, and our weekly editorial item, please click here.

Version is produced by the Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego; the UCSD Division of Arts and Humanities; the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CAL-IT2); and the Software Studies Initiative.

Editors: Jordan Crandall and Caleb Waldorf.
Website Design and Development: Caleb Waldorf and John W. Pattenden-Fail.

Additional support is provided by the UCSD Center for the Humanities; the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA); the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA); and the University of California Digital Arts Research Network (UC DARnet).

January 29, 2009

SOMETHING is HAPPENING is a 3-day event that focuses on the dynamics of sensation and the nature of gatherings. Rather than experiencing a single, formal presentation, audiences can freely gather and disband at a collection of different sites in the San Diego area including the UC campus, the Salk Institute, Torrey Pines State Reserve, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. At these meeting points, audiences are immersed in sensory and atmospheric experiences through which concepts are not only elaborated but enacted.

SOMETHING is HAPPENING is a collage of verbal and performative presentations that encourages the cultivation of moods, atmospheres, and various forms of bodily apprehension and awareness. By addressing the audience as a sensing body -- whether as individuals or collectively as a group -- the presenters seek to not only share ideas but also to activate multiple sensory connections with the spectators. In this way we are not taking a reductive approach so much as an excessive one -- opening up conceptual flows and sensorial intensities that always carry with them the possibility of extension and amplification.

By emphasizing forms of sensory experience, social interaction and assembly, SOMETHING is HAPPENING aims to generate commonalities beyond what can be conveyed in dialogue -- allowing participants who come from different backgrounds to cross linguistic boundaries and familiar perspectives, however temporarily, and enter into new social composites.

December 4-6, 2008

Presentations by Benjamin Bratton, Norman Bryson, Teddy Cruz, Ricardo Dominguez, Louis Hock, Adriene Jenik, Niklaus Largier, Alphonso Lingis, Kyong Park, Haim Steinbach, Lesley Stern, Michael Taussig, Michael Trigilio, Caleb Waldorf/The Public School, Sybil Wendler, and graduate students of the UC San Diego Visual Arts Program: George Bolster, Rich Bott, Crystal Campbell, Micha Cardenas, Mauricio Chernovetzky, Lili Chin, Micki Davis, Noah Doely, Rob Duarte, Anna Lavatelli, Elle Mehrmand, Zac Monday, Zac Montanaro, Sheryl Oring, Brianna Rigg, Lesha Rodriguez, Jerry Troung, Nina Waisman, David White, Andrew Wilson (in collaboration with Todd Margolis), and Suzanne Wright.

SOMETHING is HAPPENING is produced by the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, as part of its new Public Culture program, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). The event is organized by Jordan Crandall with Sybil Wendler and the graduate students of the UCSD Visual Arts program, based on an original concept developed by Jordan Crandall, Steve Fagin, and Lesley Stern. Additional support provided by the UCSD Department of Anthropology and Department of Ethnic Studies.

For the schedule and project details, please visit http://visarts.ucsd.edu/something-happening