Ars Electronica festival + The Afghan Women's Writing Project

2 recommended links:

1) ArsElectronica: hybrid art (+much more)

Ars Electronica is an internationally unique platform for digital art and media culture. It’s made up of 4 divisions: an avant-garde festival, a competition that functions as a showcase of excellence, a museum, and a media art lab. In September, the media festival took place in Linz, and this year's competition winners were announced.

Here the direct links to the winning works in the category computer animation: Nuit Blanche - a short film / 'hyper real fantasy', a fleeting moment between 2 strangers by Arev Manoukian (Canada), there also is a making of online. And the winner in the category digital music & sound art: rheo: 5 horizons - an audiovisual installation by Ryoichi Kurokawa (Japan).

a walk through the festival: there's an excellent feature with many embedded videos online in the german newspaper Zeit. most videos are english with subtitles, so just scroll down, ignore the german, and click the videos: ars electronica videos page 1 / page 2 / page 3

more: more direct links to winners of the other categories are up here, and all winners and honorable mentions are listed here: ars electronica 2010 winners.

related books / categories in Daily s-Press
- let a thousand dictionaries bloom - Sean Burn (live art documentary)
- Letters Patterns Structures - Andrew Topel (visual poetry)
- daily bookshelf: experimental

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2) The Afghan Women’s Writing Project

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is aimed at allowing Afghan women to have a direct voice in the world, not filtered through male relatives or members of the media:

"Many of these Afghan women have to make extreme efforts to gain computer access in order to submit their writings, in English, to the project. Most of our Afghan writers participate in the project partially or entirely in secret from friends and family. The Afghan Women’s Writing Project began as an idea during novelist Masha Hamilton’s last trip to Afghanistan in November 2008."

The project reaches out to talented and generous women author/teachers in the United States and engages them, on a volunteer, rotating basis, to teach Afghan women online from Afghanistan. They use women teachers due to cultural sensitivities in Afghanistan. The writing workshops are taught in three secure online classrooms. To read the stories, visit the homepage with latest essays and information.

related books / categories in Daily s-Press
- A Thousand Sisters - Lisa Shannon (the chronicle of a sponsorship)
- Zahra's Paradise(international graphic web novel)
- daily bookshelf: the world these days

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PS: there also is a personal editor's note on this feature, it can be found here: worlds.