Coahulla Creek High opens with digital tablets for all

Dalton Daily Citizen (Tennessee) - Gone will be the days of lugging loads of heavy textbooks when Coahulla Creek High School’s 700 students occupy the building on Crow Road in Varnell in a few weeks.

The high school, which has been under construction for three years, will open Aug. 8 with 100 to 200 students more than expected for the first year since Whitfield Board of Education members voted to allow anyone who wants to to attend it, and since students got word they’ll get their own iPad-like digital devices.  Read more.

LouisianaDigitalMediaCenter at LSU to House Video Game Development Workers

KATC 3 (Louisiana) - Today, Gov. Bobby Jindal joined Electronic Arts Inc. Head of Worldwide Quality Assurance Mike Robinson, LSU Chancellor Michael V. Martin, and Mayor-President Kip Holden to break ground on the 94,000-square-foot LouisianaDigitalMediaCenter that eventually will be home to 600 video game development workers and LSU's Center for Computation & Technology.  Read more.

Turn On, Plug In, Walk Out: How "Street Show" Transforms a Single USB Stick Into a Guerrilla Art Gallery

Art Info - There aren't too many art exhibitions in Chelsea that you have to hunt for, with the rare exception being those fifth-floor galleries that don't seem to have an elevator or staircase. But even through Michael Manning's "Street Show: The Things Between Us" has a street-level Chelsea location, most viewers will pass it by without a second glance. That's because the entire exhibition is condensed onto a USB stick embedded in the façade of Eyebeam, a new media art center and gallery space on West 21st Street. The only way to view the show? Bring your own laptop along, and ideally your own USB extension cord, too.

"Street Show: The Things Between Us" gathers the work of 22 new media and Internet artists...read more.  Read more.

'Invention & Intervention,' Hong Kong's big new media arts festival

CNN - Making use of digital art, computer robotics and interactive art, as well as new media arts advances in technology, a dynamic exhibition in Hong Kong -- “Invention & Intervention -- Power Showcase of Hong Kong New Media Artists” -- reflects our lives and emotions.

Joel Kwong, exhibition curator and program director of Microwave, which organized the expo together with the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, says, “Hong Kong new media artists are maturing at an amazing speed, surpassing that of traditional artists.”

With the number of art venues and exhibitions proliferating around the city in recent years, Hong Kong, has become a breeding ground for new media artists, nurturing local talents.  Read more.

Second Degree in Digital Arts

Times of Malta - The University of Malta has launched a postgraduate award in digital arts practice and theory that takes a cross-disciplinary approach to creative expression and communication. This is a relatively new and exciting field of research that covers the convergence of technology with fine art, video, film, performance, games, design and online art.  Read more.

"Digital Art Battle" in NYC

DNA Info (NYC) - A group of street artists will compete in a "digital art battle" Wednesday night, using handheld computer tablets to create real-time works in front of a live audience.

The event, held at the Openhouse Gallery on Mulberry Street, features eight artists working in pairs as their designs are projected live in the rotating exhibition space.  Read more.

GIFs Gone Wild: Brooklyn's New Media Art Haven 319 Scholes Stirs Up the Real and the Digital

Art Info - 319 Scholes, a polished, garage-like space located in the industrial wilds between Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood and what is optimistically called "East Williamsburg," might not immediately strike visitors as the next great hope of new media art. However, over the past two years of its history, the art space — something between a small-town rec room, a teenage-bedroom multimedia lair, and an alternative gallery — has become a meeting spot for the digital art community with an ambitious program of multimedia installations, internet art, and independent projects.  Read more.

Tech lovers learn how iPad can be used as a creative tool

Indy Star - Forget surfing the Net and playing "Angry Birds" -- that iPad can serve your artistic soul.

As part of its Digital Arts class roster, the Indianapolis Art Center has launched iPad painting workshops, two-hour sessions that transform the tool into an artist's studio, complete with canvases, brushes, paints and more.  Read more.

Interactive Art Project Lets Users Investigate Anonymous Border Deaths

The Bay Citizen (San Francisco) - Border crossing deaths are both commonly known and little understood—which is why San Francisco-based political artist Ian Alan Paul launched “Border Haunt", an interactive, digital art piece today at noon.

When it comes to undocumented immigrant deaths at the U.S./Mexico border, there’s no shortage of grim data available. One report, released in 2009 by the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties and Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights, calls the issue a “humanitarian crisis” and claims that the U.S.’s draconian border patrol measures have led to more than 5,000 deaths in the past 20 years.

Another, interactive map -- this one compiled by a group called Humane Borders, Inc. – logs each body recovered in Arizona between 1999 and 2009 as a red dot on the state’s topography. It’s a staggering image: a blood-tinted melee of overlapping pockmarks.  Read more.

Angelo Rombley’s Internet Art for St. Martin’s Emancipation Day

Bahamas Weekly - Digital artist Angelo Rombley launched four art installations on the Internet last Sunday in a tribute to the celebration of St. Martin’s Emancipation Day on July 1.

The digital art pieces, rendered in a neo-revolutionary street-poster style, are entitled, “July 1 upRising X,” “FreeSM,” “SXM 1848,” and “July 1 upRising.” Rombley is an award-winning graphic designer who lists Fortune 500 companies among his clients and employers.  Read more.

Danial Nord's Monstrous Mouse

KCET (California) - "I'm back to reality," says LA media artist Danial Nord as he explains his arduous struggle with the 18-gauge fence wire that forms the armature for the body of a hapless Mickey Mouse who lays dead or passed out on the floor of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park.

Nord is among the artists who received City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowships last year, with the mandate that he push his work in a new direction. For Nord, whose recent work has focused on video art and installation...read more.

Closing gaps between man and machine

Haaretz - Amit Pitaru is a self-described artist, planner, designer, teacher and entrepreneur, whose innovations focus on human-centered computing.  Read more.

Five minutes with… Robb Green

Creative Boom - Robb’s been a digital creative of one sort or another since 2005 - when he realised that his twin obsessions, the internet and colouring in, could be combined for fun and profit. In the last six years he’s art directed and designed award-winning campaigns for people like Louis Vuitton, Speedo, British Red Cross and WWF (not the wrestling), and had work featured in Creative Review, Digital Arts and New Media Age.  Read more.

BMW art car tour

Max Eternity - Known for its innovative spirit of design and it's brazen commitment to supporting visual artists, BMW [automotive] group launches a virtual tour of its collecting of artist painted cars, including one-off cars painted by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.  Read more.

"Almost Alice" artist ends up down the rabbit hole

North County Times (San Diego & Riverside CA) - Artist Maggie Taylor didn't start out to create an exhibition full of "Alice in Wonderland"-inspired works. Far from it.

"I had been doing some digital work with rabbits, holes in the ground and Victorian children," she said from her studio in Gainesville, Fla. "Several people remarked that it reminded them of 'Alice in Wonderland.' So I started to do a few images like that, but I didn't know how much it would take over. Now it's three years and 45 images later."  Read more.

New TSTC digital art program looking for boot-camp artists

Reporter News (Texas) - If you've always wanted to design your own universe, a new digital arts program at Texas State Technical College can provide you with the skills to go to "TRON" and beyond.

TSTC is partnering with Steambot studios — the concept artists behind "Brink," "TRON: Legacy" and "Prince of Persia," among others — to build the school's newest program.

The two-year digital arts program involves a free five-week boot camp, from which the students for the first program will be selected.  Read more.

Contemporary Hindi art: Digital take on Puranas

The Hindu (India) - Geologist and ex-ONGC officer turned painter S.R. Kolluri has earned himself a name for his graphic art. He had worked on a computer graphic art on 108 episodes of Ramayana. That four-year-long effort is now in the Bhadrachalam temple. Artist Kolluri has come a long way from playing with acrylic and water-colours.

This septuagenarian is full of life and says animatedly, “I work on Photoshop on my iMac with a vacuum tablet to create these works of art.  Read more.

Technology meets art: Why we’ll bin easels for pixels

Metro (UK) - A new wave of British artists is swapping paints and brushes for computer mice and light pens to use digital technology as a creative medium.

Emerging talents such as UnitedVisualArtists, Troika and Random International are among the driving forces behind creations including kinetic sculptures, interactive lighting installations and data visuals.

New technology becoming more readily available, cheaper hardware and easy-to-use software are boosting the movement that has already been used by big-name music acts for stunning stage visuals and iconic art installations at new buildings such as Heathrow’s Terminal 5.  Read more.

010101 Art in Technological Times @ SFMoMA

Max Eternity - Currently at SFMoMA is a show entitled "010101 Art in Technological Times" featuring the work of notable digital artists, including the late Jeremy Blake.  An online presentation of the exhibition can be found here, and a brief descriptor of the show reads as follows:  

A major art exhibition and far-reaching digital technology initiative, 010101 charts new developments in contemporary art, architecture, and design as they evolve in, and are influenced by, a world altered by the increasing presence of digital media and technology. Presented in the galleries and online, the exhibition features work (including many newly commissioned pieces) in all media by some 35 artists and designers.