Rhizome

Nick Hasty is Rhizome's Director of Technology

Here's my top 5 list of DIY audio art kits to keep you busy in 2010.

► Arduinome

Open source, Arduino-based version of the monome controller interface that utilizes usb midi and open sound control. Great for controlling instruments, installations, and performances.

► Casper Electronics Drone Lab

Peter Edwards' Drone Lab is a 4 voice analog drone synth, rhythm generator and FX processor. A great kit from one of the kings of circuit bending.

► Loud Objects Kit

Simple but powerful kit from the Loud Objects performance group. You can easily integrate your own code to write new low-bit jams.

► Triwave Picogenerator and other assorted kits by 4ms

4ms has been making a wide variety of wonderful and novel instruments for nearly 15 years. These guys are pros and extremely nice to boot.

► the x0xb0x

Open-source version of the Roland TB-303. What more could you ask for?

Régine Debatty is the founder and editor of the art, design and technology blog we make money not art. She also writes for several European design and art magazines, curates, and speaks about art and technology at various conferences and festivals.

For this list, Régine pulled together her favorite PDF-based resources from the past year.

► Manipulating Reality
To be honest i won't see this one until early January but Strozzina always organizes great shows that integrate tech and non tech-based artworks. Plus, they upload all the essays of their catalogs online.

► Awake Are Only the Spirits
Reason 1: HMKV in ugly Dortmund has the most exciting program of exhibitions and events in Europe. Reason 2 can be summed up in 3 words: Supernatural and technology. Reason 3: The PDF of the exhibition guide is online.

► LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre's press dossiers
Laboral is located in a tiny city in Northern Spain, the closest airport offers about one to two international flights. But the press dossiers of its exhibitions make up for Laboral's deficiency in plane connections. They are available as PDF and are so informative, I sometimes confuse them with the real catalogues.

► Fashion-able. Hacktivism and engaged fashion design
Otto von Busch (the only man I've ever met who is more elegant than Audrey Hepburn)'s brilliant thesis is from 2008, but he kindly put it online a few months ago.

► Brody Condon - Known Planes of Existence
I fell in love with Brody Condon's video game take on religious Medieval paintings at the LOOP video art fair in Barcelona. Brody Condon - Known Planes of Existence, a small catalog about his work is waiting for your click over here: http://www.tmpspace.com/images3/JudgmentCatalog_web.pdf

Travess Smalley is an artist who lives in New York City. He is currently showing work in Art Since the Summer of '69's show "Objects, Furniture and Patterns", and is part of internet collectives Loshadka and Computers Club. He is also one half of the design duo Poster Company. He is an intern at Rhizome.

20 Jazz Funk Greats strength is in their rampant use of cosmic and cryptic verbs. "Jacky Daw" by Pumajaw presents a combination of CAN grooves and pagan howls.

Kingdom's own mp3 blog Patent Leather Daddy has had its share of amazing mixes and posts this year (hello Latin Freestyle & Gym Jams). But he also made a phenomenal mix for discobelle.net. The last 15 minutes give me goosebumps.

Further listening: Lower End Spasm - BOK BOK b2b KINGDOM - Night Slugs Show - Sub FM 27 . 06 . 09 and Nguzunguzu's Mix for Discobelle

Synergy's Larry Fast is best known on Rhizome as the music in Ron Hayes Delta Videos. I found this song on Momus's livejournal, Click Opera, before finding Aesoteric Sounds had uploaded a vinyl copy of the full album.

This essay was originally commissioned by Hordaland Kunstsenter (Hordaland Art Centre) in Bergen, Norway, to coincide with HC Gilje's solo exhibition blink. Thank you to Mitchell Whitelaw, HC Gilje and Hordaland Kunstsenter for allowing us to republish it to Rhizome News.

The digital network, where we all spend ever more of our time, is a vast infrastructure of generality. It deploys a system which is standardised, formally defined, highly structured, and internally consistent. If I send you an email, I do it trusting that the interlinked systems of hard- and software, the protocols for data encoding and transmission, the network switches and servers, will all hold together so that the email you receive is the same as the one I sent. Perhaps I'm in Australia, and you are in Norway: we could say that the network generalises our two points in space - for the network, they are the same. As I draft my email it exists as a pattern of voltages and magnetic flux inside my computer. To transmit that pattern effectively, the digital network must erase or resist any local errors or inconsistencies that it might encounter along the way, so that it does not matter if the pattern travels by optical fibre or copper, or in radio waves, or if a boat anchor cut through a cable near Indonesia. It does not matter that your computer is made of different atoms to mine. Those are specificities - local, material events and instances. Digital culture, and networked space, absorbs specificities, compensates for them, rectifies them into generality. Wireless broadband and mobile computing make us into human nodes, bathing in shared connective protocols.

The aesthetics of digital media flow from a related generality, where sound and image are encoded as fields of data. If a pixel is a number, an image is a grid of pixels, video a stream of images, and each of these numbers can take any value at all, then formally, an aesthetics of digital video is only a matter of finding the right values - fishing around in a space containing all possible digital video. If digital media creates this generalised space, anything at all, the media arts are faced with unavoidable questions: not only what to make - which values to choose, but how to choose them, and why?

Jonathan Vingiano is an internet surfer based in Brooklyn, NY and he graduated from Emerson College in Boston, MA with a degree in Experimental Media. He recently completed a project for JstChillin's "Serial Chillers in Paradise" and will be in an group show opening January 15th at Tompkins Projects in NYC. He is the hype-man of the rap trio LIONSHARE. Jonathan is Rhizome's Technology Associate.

► The web web
thewebweb is a net art website in seven acts.
The balance between Internet mythology and new html technology (canvas & js) is perfect.
By Anton Gerasimenko, Sergey Chikuyonok, Kostya Loginov, Showpanorama, Vladislav Yakovlev, Natasha Klimchuk, Kate Malykh, Sergey Filippov, Andrey Zubrilov, Anton Schnaider, Vasily Dubovoy

► Webjam
< ~ ~> surfing club

► Avastard by Carlo Lowfi
A great piece with Twitter avatars.

► Temporary.cc
The question about archive when visit really matters.

► GEO GOO by JODI
One of my favorite 2009 exhibition. The way they expose net art in real life was for me inspiring.
Photo gallery

► Mybiennalisbetterthanyours
A Fresh net art overview for 2009 by Tolga Taluy

► Ben Schumacher
Especially his piece 0%

► Junk Jet
A nerdy fanzine discovered in 2009.

► net.art GIANT FUNNEL
The feed I should take on a desert island.

Caitlin Jones is the Executive Director of the Western Front Society in Vancouver, BC. Prior to this appointment she had a combined curatorial and conservation position at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and was the Director of Programming at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York. A key member of the Variable Media Network, Caitlin has also been responsible for developing important tools and policy for the preservation of electronic and ephemeral artworks. She has been a contributor to Rhizome and her other writings have appeared in a wide range of exhibition catalogues, periodicals and other international publications.

► The Real Thing« curated by VVORK
VVORK taking it to the next level.

► Donk -- Music World.
Never thought I would be so into something that Vice Magazine was responsible for, but this documentary is fantastic. Thanks Michael Bell-Smith for telling me about it.

► The Bichon Frisé in Art @ Art since the Summer 69
http://www.artsince69.com/index.php?/upcoming/the-bichon-frise-in-art/
http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~eshephar/bichoninart/bichoninart.html
C-U-T-E

► See This Sound
http://www.lentos.at/en/45_1769.asp
http://beta.see-this-sound.at/
One of the best "historical" shows I've seen in years.

► Digital Folklore Reader
(full disclosure, I worked as an editor on this book)
Smart, original and has unicorns on the cover.
Edited by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied
Designed by Manuel Buerger
Texts and projects by: Cory Arcangel, Julia Böger, Manuel Buerger, Helene Dams, Dragan Espenschied, Jörg Frohnmayer, Mark Grimm, Christopher Heller, Yunchul Kim, Dennis Knopf, Stefan Krappitz, Florian Kröner, Tobias Leingruber, Olia Lialina, Leo Merz, Bernadette Neuroth, o+ro, johannes p osterhoff, Isabel Pettinato, Michael Ruß, Theo Seemann, Alexander Schlegel, Bert Schutzbach, Siegfried Zielinsky

Rhizome's Community Campaign is still underway. For a minimum of $25, you can become a member and help us reach our $35,000 goal by January 14, 2010. We rely on our members to make programs like Rhizome Commissions, the ArtBase, and exhibitions possible. Membership also comes with benefits such as full access to the ArtBase, Commissions Voting, and more. Join today!

Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist, professor and writer. His writing has appeared in numerous international publications including WIRED Magazine, Make Magazine, Neural, Rhizome, Art Asia Pacific, Gizmodo and more, and his work has been shown at events such as DEAF (03,04), Art Futura (04), SIGGRAPH (00,05), UBICOMP (02,03,04), CHI (04,06) Transmediale (02,04,08), NIME (07), ISEA (02,04,06,09), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (04), Whitney Museum of American Art's ArtPort (03), Ars Electronica (02,04,08), Chelsea Art Museum, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (04-5),Museum of Modern Art (MOMA - NYC)(2008), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2008). He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is an adjunct assistant professor of communications at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and in the Media, Culture, Communication dept of NYU Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development.

2009 was an important year for the Internet as a whole. The advent of web 2.0 and "crowdsourcing" initiatives has enabled a much richer array of content from users who might never have ventured onto the Internet in previous years. My top 10 sites for this year cover a wide range of topics from art made for mobile devices with iPhoneArt.org to evidence of both information saturation with Information Aesthetics and physical and pseudo intellectual abundance with This is Why You're Fat and There I Fixed It, to strange observances of mistakes in the public realm with Fail Blog. In addition to these crowdsourced content sites, I also see some ongoing potential with artist-created sites such as Brett Domino's lowtech approach to music making, VVANK's clever use of everyday objects as installation pieces, Spam Poetry's method of turning garbage email into clever and substantive literature, and Rotterdam's Moddr group who have created a novel DIY aesthetic to hacking and recycling outdated electronics. Below are my top links for 2009, enjoy and remember that the Internet is only as good as we make it, even if our brain power is feeding someone else's click-through rates and embedded ad revenue. For 2010, bring on the revolution with Web 3.0!

Jo-Anne Green is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., a small, not-for-profit experimental arts organization whose current projects include Turbulence.org, Networked_Performance, Networked_Music_Review, Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) and Upgrade! Boston. She is also an artist, writer, curator, and Adjunct Faculty at Emerson College.

Helen Thorington is Founder and Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. She is a sound artist and radio producer whose works have been aired internationally and received numerous prestigious awards. Helen has also created compositions for film and dance, including the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company. She has exhibited, performed, published and lectured world-wide.