5th International Mobile Music Workshop 2008
13-15 May 2008, Vienna, Austria

Call for Submissions: Deadline 10 February 2008
Visit the 2007 website here: http://www.mobilemusicworkshop.org/07/index.html

The Mobile Music Workshop 2008 is the 5th in a series of annual international gatherings that explore the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. They are inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends. We are looking for new ideas and ground-breaking projects on sound in mobile contexts. What new forms of interaction with music and audio lie ahead as locative media, ubiquitous networks, and music access merge into new forms of experiences that shape the everyday? Can they change the way we think about our mobile devices and about walking through the city?

The emerging field of Mobile Music sits at the intersection of ubiquitous computing, portable audio technology and New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). It goes beyond today’s personal music players to include creative practices of mobile music making, sharing and mixing. The mobile setting challenges existing notions of interfaces and interaction, stretching music to new creative limits. The workshop has been at the forefront of this innovative area since 2004. Past editions of the event have taken place in Amsterdam, Brighton, Vancouver and Göteborg in collaboration with the Viktoria Institute, STEIM, Waag Society, Futuresonic, NIME and others.

The 2008 edition of the workshop will be held in Vienna, one of the hotspots in the European for laptop, glitch, and electronic music. Hosted by the University of Applied Arts, it will feature three evenings of performances and installations, an exhibition in the heart of the city, invited speakers, paper presentations, posters and demo sessions as well as hands-on tutorials. Besides the workshop proceedings, we will publish a catalogue that will gather key contributions from the last 5 years. We invite artists, designers, academic researchers, hackers, industry professionals and practitioners from all areas, including music, technology development, new media, sound-art, music distribution, cultural/media studies and locative media and more to present and discuss projects, prototypes, applications, devices, performances, installations, theoretical and historical considerations.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES
Submission deadline: 10 February 2008
Notification of acceptance: 14 March 2008
Submission deadline for final papers: 14 April 2008
Registration deadline: 14 April 2008

PARTICIPATE
Please upload your submission in any of the three following categories at http://ocs.waag.org/. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by a committee of international specialists in the field.

ORGANISERS & INFORMATION
The 2008 edition is hosted and co-organised by the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria (Nicolaj Kirisits). The Steering Committee is formed by Lalya Gaye (Dånk! Collective and IT-University of Göteborg, Sweden), Atau Tanaka (Culture Lab Newcastle, UK), Frauke Behrendt (University of Sussex, UK), Kristina Andersen (STEIM, The Netherlands).
Contact: info [at] mobilemusicworkshop.org
More information: http://www.mobilemusicworkshop.org

Futuresonic brings 500 opinion formers, futurologists, artists, technologists and scientists from the digital culture, music and art communities to Manchester for four days of seminars, workshops and events.

At the heart of the Futuresonic festival is the internationally-acclaimed Futuresonic conference, and its focal point the Social Technologies Summit, which looks at how technologies can create an extension of social space or support group interaction, and asks how we can make technology more social.

Submissions are now invited to the Futuresonic conference and the Social Technologies Summit. Proposals for talks, presentations and workshops plus also session themes are invited. Submissions of innovative formats for social interaction are encouraged.

Online, Mobile and Unplugged Social Networking

The Futuresonic conference is a place where important international discussions take place. The conference will bring together leading figures to unpick the hype around the latest technological zeitgeist, broaden the debate, and propose and explore a critical understanding of social technologies.

The 2008 conference will explore the theme of The Social – Online, Mobile and Unplugged Social Networking. Submissions are invited that explore the new social spaces and the social implications of technologies for the many different kinds of people who make, use and are affected by them.

Computers have become social interfaces for sharing digital media and collaborating to build online communities and folksonomies. Social technologies create an extension of social space, and new ways for people to find the stuff that interests them, link up with others, and share. They include tools and applications that enable people to connect, share and interact, such as blogs, instant messenger, social software such as Flickr, FaceBook and Jaiku, and even the internet itself. ‘Social technologies’ can also refer to technologies created and maintained by social networks, such as communities of developers and users working collaboratively with open source tools.

What distinguishes social technologies is that they are bottom up and many-to-many instead of one-to-one or one-to-many. They can be seen as a part of a major cultural and social shift. And yet at the same time we also see how electronic communication can isolate us, as more and more people drown in a deluge of email that generates stress, even reducing IQ – puncturing the rose-tinted view that life is ‘more social.’ Additionally, ‘online communities’ are based upon an artificial equivalence between ‘users’ which obscures power relationships and issues of ownership.

Deadline: 5pm, Tuesday 18 December 2007.

http://www.futuresonic.com/