<nettime-ann> SPACE Media Arts announces 4 new artist commissions focuss

***For Immediate Release -- 12 July 2006***

***SPACE Media Arts announces four new artist commissions focussed on
RFID***

SPACE Media Arts is pleased to announce the commissioning of four new
artworks focussed on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology by
artist collectives C6, boredomresearch, Processing Plant (Louis Philippe
Demers and Philippe Jean), and Mute-Dialogue (Yasser Rashid and Yara
El-Sherbini).

Even if you don?t know what a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag
is, you?ve probably used one, whether it?s at your local grocery store
checkout, using an Oyster Card or in your passport at the airport. RFID
is the barcode of the future. The tags can be read through radio waves
without any contact and, potentially, without your knowledge. With
widespread adoption across many commercial and public industries, RFID
is set to shape societies of the future.

Through these commissions, SPACE Media Arts is encouraging artists,
technologists and ?end-users? to explore RFID technology from
alternative perspectives. These works, along with a site-specific Oyster
Card performance by artist Paula Roush, will be exhibited in //Tagged//,
opening at SPACE on 5 October and running through to 18 October 2006. A
newly-commissioned text by Armin Medosch will accompany the exhibition.

For more information, contact Heather Corcoran on +44 (0)208 525 4339 or
by email at heather@spacestudios.org.uk.

***Further information:***

REALSNAILMAIL is a project in development by *boredomresearch*,
employing RFID technology to enable real snails to carry and deliver
electronic messages. Is there a place in our speed obsessed lives for a
service that takes time?

iTAG by *Processing Plant* is an ironic statement about the electronic
pollution that surrounds us ? a portable device that reads RFID tags
from surrounding products and generates ambient musak inspired from this
collected data.

*Mute-Dialogue* will create an interactive installation exploring tagged
objects and their histories in ORIGINS AND LEMONS. The project subtly
critiques the use of technology to access histories, and asks how we
know the world we live in through interactions with material objects.

*C6* will implement RFID technology in the ANTISYSTEMIC DISTRIBUTED
LIBRARY PROJECT, an alternative distributed library of community shared
books, videos, and music. With institutional libraries acting as one of
the earliest adopters of RFID technology, how does RFID fit in with more
radical ideas of librarianship? And what are the radical politics of
RFID itself?

//SPACE Media Arts is at 129 ? 131 Mare Street, Hackney, London, E8 4AA
| http://www.spacestudios.org.uk//