The Alianait! arts festival in Nunavut is being streamed live on the internet on Isuma.TV every night this week beginning at 7 pm. From the festival website:

The Alianait Arts Festival is an annual event in its fourth year. No less than ten days (and nights) of art, music, film, storytelling, circus arts, dance and theatre. Alianait is an Inuit expression of joy and celebration and to celebrate our fourth annual festival, the theme for Alianait 2008 is String Games - an ancient Inuit tradition.

The festival started on June 21 and runs until July 1. Here's the webcast schedule for Isuma.TV:

June 21: 7 to 10 pm EST –
ALIANAIT GRAND OPENING - LIVE at www.isuma.tv from the Big Top

June 22 : 7 to 9 pm EST –
FIBONACCI CIRCUS PERFORMANCE - LIVE from the Big Top

June 23: 7 to 9 pm EST –
NUNAVUT ARTS FESTIVAL WITH LIVE MUSIC - LIVE from the Old Residence

June 24: 7 to 9 pm EST –
ARTICIRQ/OATIARIO - LIVE from the Big Top

June 25: 7 to 10 pm –
STORYTELLING PERFORMANCE - LIVE from Parish Hall

June 26: 7 to 10 pm EST-
SAQIYUQ THEATRE PERFORMANCE – LIVE from the Parish Hall

June 27: 7 to 9 pm EST –
ART EXHIBIT – LIVE from the Nunatta Museum

June 28: 7 to 9 pm EST –
YOUTH MUSIC CONCERT – LIVE from the Big Top

June 29: 2 to 5 pm EST –
FREE MUSIC CONCERT – LIVE from the Big Top

June 30: 7 to 10 pm EST –
STRING GAMES FINALE CONCERT – LIVE from the Big Top

July 1: 2 to 5 pm EST –
FREE MUSIC CONCERT - LIVE from the Big Top

The winners of Amnesty International's 17th annual Media Awards have been announced. The awards were created to recognize excellence in human rights reporting and to acknowledge journalism's contribution to raising awareness and understanding about human rights issues. It's not exactly art in the traditional sense, but there is the 'art of fact', so to speak, in how the historical “now” is (re)created from the miasma of infinite facts of material reality. And, these are important stories being told by courageous culture-makers and we would like to share in acknowledging their bravery and the importance of their contributions.

This year also marked the first NEW MEDIA award given to Iraqi journalist Sahar al-Haideri, who was tragically killed shortly after her article “Honour killing sparks fears of new Iraqi conflict” was published on the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's website.

The other journalists being honored are:

GABY RADO MEMORIAL AWARD (for a journalist covering human rights for less than five years): Xan Rice, The Guardian

INTERNATIONAL TELEVISION AND RADIO - Eunice Lau, Stephanie Scawen, Tricia Tan, Tony Birtley for The lost tribe - Secret army of the CIA, Al Jazeera English

NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS - Deborah Haynesfor the Iraqi interpreters series, The Times

NATIONS AND REGIONS - Fiona Walker, Dorothy Parker, Fiona Walker, Matt Pinder, Susan McCusker Thompson for Congo to Motherwell, BBC Scotland (television)

PERIODICALS (a winner announced in each subcategory): Newspaper supplements - Jonathan Green for Selling soccer into slavery, Live (Mail on Sunday magazine); Consumer magazines - Fatima Tlisova, Sergei Bachiwin, Alexei Simonov for Russian media freedom, published by Index on Censorship

PHOTOJOURNALISM - Cédric Gerbehaye for Congo unrest, Newsweek

RADIO - Pascale Harter, Ceri Thomas, Mike Thompson for Where there's muck: Mike Thomson in the Congo, Radio 4, Today Programme

TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY AND DOCUDRAMA - Gretchen Wallace, Jane Wells, Annie Sundberg, Ricki Stern, Nick Fraser, Brian Steidle for Storyville: The devil came on horseback, BBC FOUR / Break Thru Films

TELEVISION NEWS - Chris Rogers, Deborah Turness, Tony Hemmings for Too young to die - Children of the frontline, ITV News / ITN

It’s not often that you visit a major civic gallery and come away amazed, disturbed and politically provoked. Rebecca Belmore’s current exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery does exactly that and more. It is a remarkable retrospective for an artist deeply engaged in some of the most defining and difficult politics of our time.

Belmore’s practice encompasses sculpture/installation, performance, video and photography. The exhibition includes video documentation of five of Bellmore’s performances, and the much talked about video installation Fountain (2005), which is projected on a wall of falling water in a darkened room. The exhibition also includes some of her sculpture work and components from her performances. There is so much to see in this collection and all of it so very good.

Belmore’s art is an embodied practice, and as an aboriginal woman, her body is a complicated site where colonial, cultural and resistant tensions are inscribed on a daily basis. Wild (2001-2008) is a four-post bed with a red satin bedcover woven from beaver pelts and (black) human hair. The bed was created for an exhibition in The Grange, a colonial building that served as the original location of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Belmore sleeps in the bed unannounced. Nearby, hangs the disturbing Fringe (2008), a near life-size backlit photograph of a woman, naked but for a white sheet over her hips, lying on her side facing away from the viewer. On her back is a huge transversal wound starting at her right shoulder and ending below her left hip. The wound is sewn together, and hanging from the stitches are the beginnings of beadwork, small red beads decorating threads hanging from the grotesquely damaged skin.

(more on the exhibition...)

Even wonder what you’re not getting access to on the internet? New technologies and new powers that be are increasingly capable of filtering websites from online use. A new book from MIT Press Access Denied gives the skinny on internet censoring strategies and motivations. From a review at neural.it:

Ten OpenNet Initiative (ONI) researchers were involved in this seminal report for a few years, focusing on general internet filtering strategies and motivations, and analyzing the filtering conditions and legal/ethical tactics state by state .. Every sensitive country has its own mix of motivations and consequent strategies. So, showing a warning or a disguising error web page is a political choice, directly reflecting the government policies, as well as using passwords, IP classes or entire services (Skype) as the censorship technical targets. Scanning the different filtering politics is like viewing a social and political atlas, revealing what a formal territory fear most. And the resulting patterns constitute a contemporary geography of mute networks.

On May 4, 1970 four students of Kent State University were shot dead by National Guardsmen during a protest against the US government's invasion of Cambodia. It was a frightening acting out of violence by the state -- like the earlier and less well remembered murder of three black students by state troopers at South Carolina State College (February 8, 1968; another 28 injured), and at Jackson State University on May 14, 1970 where two black students were killed (another 12 injured) by local police. In all three tragedies the state turned against its citizens engaged only in the democratically legitimate activity of dissent.

Mike and Kendra's website – May 4, 1970 – is an online archival memorial about the Kent State event and about the subsequent struggle with University officials to have memorials constructed in the parking lot where the students were killed. The website documents in detail and with photographs what happened not only on May 4, but in the days leading up to the May 4 killings and the subsequent court trial.

The website also provides information about the lesser known Jackson State University tragedy.

In memoriam.

Imagine a world where the power company controlled which appliances you could plug into the outlet, or charged special fees for some appliances and not others. It's a clever analogy used by Lawrence Lessig to explain the importance of net neutrality. Imagine a world where your ISP had the power to charge you more to visit some websites over others, to decide which websites you can visit on their network, and charged some websites more than others for network access.

Lawrence Lessig -- Stanford Professor and founder of the Center for Internet and Society, makes the case in a recent interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.

Lessig also talks about the phenomenal growth of Google -- originally an experiment by a group of graduate students at Standford looking for a better search engine. He says that if telecommunications companies had the ability to 'traffic shape' and 'data manage' when Google was started, the Google folks would have needed permission from the network provider (AT & T) to start their project.

Others matters talked about include concerns over the amount of personal information being accumulated by Google, Yahoo's handing over personal information to the government of China, the Creative Commons, and Lessig's most recent project -- Change Congress, his attempt to instigate anti-corruption congressional reform in the United States.

It's a great interview. Check out the April 17, 2008 Democracy Now program, the interview starts about 40:00 in (the rest of the show is great, too).

Bell Canada - Canada's largest internet provider - is going ahead with its plan to undermine net neutrality. They call it “traffic shaping” and “traffic management”, but what it adds up to is the end of net neutrality for anyone on the Bell system. This includes Bell customers and non-Bell customers who contract with third party ISPs who use the Bell system.

Bell and other Canadian ISPs such as Rogers have been “traffic managing” for over a year, slowing some kinds of traffic down while privileging others. The data that Bell tends to target for slow down is peer-to-peer and torrent traffic. Last week, Bell applied the same “traffic shaping” controls to its third party ISPs, service providers who use the Bell system but who are independent companies with their own clients. What this means is that Bell is screwing - not only with its own customers' data, but with the accounts of third party Internet users.

Do you know whose system your ISP is using?

April 7 is the date Bell has set to have the “traffic shaping” procedures implemented across its entire network.

Check out the Bell the Throttler video -- helps to explain the warp and waft of the Bell attack on net neutrality.

For more information, check out Michael Geist's blog . To get involved in the campaign to save the internet from telecommunications robber rarons, contact Campaign for Democratic Media.

Wafaa Bilal has done it again – his latest art installation Virtual Jihadi has caused an uproar in Troy, New York. The show opened on March 6 at the Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute (RPI) which promptly (the day after the opening) shut the installation down. After reopening a few days later at a another local gallery, city officials closed the gallery citing bylaw infractions.

The artwork in question shows Bilal appearing as a character in a tweaked version of the video game The Night of Bush Capturing, a video game that was produced by Al Queda in response to the U.S. made video game Quest for Saddam. Bilal hacked the source code and wrote himself into the script.

After the show was closed by RPI, it reopened at the The Sanctuary for Independent Media. A video recording of Bilal's opening remarks is available at the Sanctuary's website. This second opening was also short lived. The gallery received a phone call (recorded and also available for listening at the website) from the city of Troy demanding they fix their front doors (apparently too narrow) or close the building. The gallery had a notice stapled to its front door preventing people from gathering in the premises.

February 12th is a date permanently etched in my brain and should be on the collective memory of North America. On this date, nearly one month ago, eighth grader Lawrence King was shot in the head by fellow fourteen year old student Brandon David McInerney in the middle of a class lab. King, an incredibly courageous openly queer fifteen year old, had asked McInerney to be his valentine. He was murdered for being queer and it is a story that the media in America had nearly ignored until Ellen Degeneres gave her sombre monologue on the incident on her show just over a week ago.

Degeneres told her audience that being gay does not make you a second class citizen, that neither King nor herself were second class citizens. And, barely able to control her emotions, she warned of a culture that sends the message if you’re gay you’ll be murdered.

Studio XX is accepting submissions for its residency and co-production programs. Project selection is made and announced at the end of April each year. Residencies are open to Quebecois and Canadian women. They are intended to offer an environment where artists can conceptualize and develop contemporary networked practices.

Residencies are eight weeks in length and include a $750 artist's fee, 45 hours of technical support ($1125 value), access to the Studio's equipment ($3335 rental value), the possibility to participate in certain group workshops ($200-300 value), and distinct working space for the artist and her instructor.

For more information about Residencies and co-production visit the Studio XX website.