Informationlab

Elfriendo is a new MySpace related service, founded on 30 January 2008, on the occasion of the International Delete Your MySpace Account Day, as a remedy.

“Deleting your MySpace page is painful. You had friends, too few or too many. It had taken over your life, or you wish it had. Was your profile stale? Were you too active? Let’s give you a new look.”

These days one hardly has time to fill in one set of fields before another update request comes in. Elfriendo reduces the number of form-filling steps to a bare minimum, without sacrificing quality or depth. People used to neglect their profiles, leaving them stale and deficient. We offer fresh sets of interests and an active look for your profile.

Elfriendo’s business is profilization - professionalizing, optimizing and automating your profile on MySpace, the world’s largest social networking site. Elfriendo is a service that keeps your profile active fresh.
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The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust operates Wood Street Galleries, which has an impressive list of featured multi-disciplinary artists from all over the world.

It’s located above the T-station at Wood Street and Sixth Avenue making it already on itself an interesting cross section of urban flows and art. That’s the feeling I got while walking around the building after arriving in town last night.

It’s upcoming exhibition called Urban Living will be even more interesting as its curator Murray Horne included the work of artists that we highly respect. And we’re honored to be part of it as well:

Urban Living

January 25 - April 5, 2008
Gallery Crawl January 25

With numerous construction projects underway, Pittsburgh’s new downtown residents look forward to many options for shaping their domestic, professional and social lives. “Urban Living” offers perspectives and propositions spanning technological and environmental issues that impact and energize urban culture.

Artists include: Pascal Glissmann & Martina Höfflin (Germany), InformationLab (Auke Touwslager and Ursula Lavrencic, The Netherlands), Sabrina Raaf (USA), Roman Kirschner(Germany), France Cadet (France).

27 & 28 February 2008
NAi (Netherlands Architecture Institute) Rotterdam, The Netherlands

“The Mobile City” is a two-day conference about locative & mobile technologies, urban culture and identity. The Mobile City brings academics, architects, urban professionals and media designers together to address the question: what happens to urban culture when physical and digital spaces merge? Keynote speakers are Stephen Graham, Tim Cresswell, Malcolm McCullough and Christian Nold.

Background

The physical, geographical city with its piazza’s, its neighbourhoods and crossings intersects with the ‘virtual space’ of electronic communication-, information- and observation-networks of GSM, GPS, CCTV, UMTS, WIFI, RFID, etc. At the same time, the domain of digital space is increasingly becoming physical, an “internet of things” is emerging. Another example is the rise of ‘pervasive games’, digital games with a physical component in urban space. Is it still useful or even possible to talk about the city as being only physical? Or about the digital world as purely ‘virtual’ (in the sense of ‘not real’ or immaterial)? The physical city and the spaces of digital technologies merge into a new “hybrid space”. Hybrid spaces are shaped by the social processes that concurrently take place in digital and physical spaces. What is the influence of these developments on the ideas we have of time, space and place, citizenship and identity?
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We’re exited to take part of the 2nd STRP Festival which takes place from 22 - 25 November in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The STRP Festival presents approximately 30 music performances divided over three days and three nights. In addition, there are a superior exhibition of about 30 art robots and/or interactive art installations (including our Cell Phone Disco), a lot of video art and artistic video clips, various Live Cinema performances, several film and documentary showings, about ten talks and lectures by artists, workshops, and a number of other projects that fall outside the scope of the above-mentioned categories.

STRP is unique because it presents visual arts and music ranking alongside film, games, and robots. At midnight, you can walk through the exhibition, while a music performance is taking place in the space next to you. STRP is unique because its varied satellite programming offers deepening on various levels. Above all, STRP is about experiencing. The exhibition is a collection of living artworks and robots that can be experienced. This also holds for the stage programming: STRP chooses dynamic technology-oriented performers. In short: at STRP you will find yourself in a wondrous world, transported to a higher level through art, music, and technology.

What birthday gift do you get from a dear bunch of smart, witty, creative & (ok i’ll stop here) geek friends? Well, two t-shirts with a semacode and the especially registered domain name aukelicio.us (which both (re)directs to my del.icio.us account). Anne, Esther, Marijn, Erik & Michael sure know how to make me happy on my 35th birthday :)

Photo: Anne Helmond