The Week Ahead: Bitcoin is Burning Edition

Here are highlights of this week's events and deadlines, culled from Rhizome Announce. 

Andrew Healy, Augmented Reality Lower Receiver

Events

Dublin

May 24: Opening of GLITCH and Run Computer Run, a festival featuring screenings, seminars, and exhibitions; lots of good people are participating. One exhibition in the lineup, titled 'Economics + The Immaterial,' asks the question, "How do we give value to immaterial goods?" Here at Rhizome, we don't believe there is such a thing as an "immaterial good." Even when Lyotard used the words "Les Immatériaux" as the title for his famous 1985 exhibition, he used the plural form, in an attempt to imply that electronic and digital entities still had some material characteristics.

But even though the exhibition uses "Immaterial" in the singular with a definitive article in front of it, several of the artists included in it have contributed works that emphasize the materiality of the digital. These include Andrew Healy's work based on 3D-printable assault rifle components (digital files that can be used to shoot you) and a project titled Hello Bitcoin by Geraldine Juarez:

I got hold of 9 miniBitcoins (0.00927616 mBTC) and burnt them - successfully contracting the overall Bitcoin supply. New Bitcoin maximum: 20999999.99022384

Bitcoin can be burned! As Rhizome's Cass Fino-Radin once famously tweeted, "Every time you reinforce the myth of immateriality, somewhere, a hard drive stops spinning. [Listing]

San Francisco

May 23: SFMOMA will host a discussion with artist Lynn Hershman Leeson about her Web project Agent Ruby, a chat bot that harvested knowledge from found online sources. Ruby was also the basis of Teknolust, a science-fiction film directed by Leeson and starring Tilda Swinton. This project has crazy relevance to artists interested in character-based performance after the Internet, people. Also participating: Amelia Jones (McGill University), Henry Lowood  (Stanford University Libraries), Moira Roth (Mills College). [Listing]

DEADLINES

Artists

May 22: Deadline for nominations or submissions for The Anational Anthropocene Schlingensie
Transmediatic Critical Artivism Metawards, which is named for the late German artist and offers prizes like "The Isaac Asimov Cybertelling Award, a silicon spider statuette for works that question narrativity in any way." Donations accepted via Bitcoin. (Is this real?) [Listing]

May 25: Applications are due for Canada's 1st Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency. [Listing]

May 27: Deadline for proposals for an event and publication at Blankspace in Manchester, UK, in response to the prompt, Feminism=. [Listing]th

Jobs

31 May: Chair, Design Studies, MacEwan University

22 May: Deadline for the position of Medialab Director at the Prado Museum.