August 03, 2006
ISEA2006 Papers
Intelligent Agent Special Issue
"In collaboration with the ISEA2006 Festival and Symposium taking place from August7-13 in San Jose, intelligent agent is featuring the papers presented at the ISEA symposium in this special issue, which is published both online and can be ordered print-on-demand at the intelligent agent website. As the symposium is breaking with some of the conventions of a conference – encouraging a more dialogical format where papers are not formally presented but pre-published online and discussed in the symposium sessions – this special issue also slightly deviates from the traditional publication format of conference proceedings. Rather than serving only as a form of "documentation" after the festival, this issue also functions as an "on site" companion to the symposium, making the papers available to symposium visitors for easy reference. It is part of the nature of this process that the essays included here are in various stages of "development": some of them have been previously published and discussed on mailing lists and then revised; others are in a "beta" stage, proposing ideas for further discussion within the symposium..." -- Patrick Lichty and Christiane Paul, Intelligent Agent.
Absence in Common: An Operator for the Inoperative Community by Kevin Hamilton :: absence, community, networks, memorials, communication, space, place
Expanding on Jean-Luc Nancy's theory of the Inoperative Community, this paper will draw from recent memorial practices and communication theory to argue for the importance of absence in the construction of sound networks. Blindly celebrated by dystopian modernists, and blissfully ignored by utopian technophiles, the experience of absence is crucial to a nonviolent and just approach to communion.
Ars Memorativa in the Interactive City: Private Layers in Public by Tapio Mäkelä :: public space, mobile, city, interactive, art of memory, interface, city, critical practice, tactics, participatory, engaging
Location based media often present a claim for reconfiguring public spaces. Exclusive access, and difficulties in designing tactics for engagement within public spaces raise questions about the validity of that claim. Mobile authoring resembles ars memorativa, art of memory, in its ability to construct private layers and memory traces over representations of place. How these traces and practices are shared and made manifest, and how critical are they as practices to begin with, should be starting points for evaluating their transformative qualities.
Art as Antibody: A Redefinition of Art for the Internet Age by Jon Ippolito, Joline Blais :: art, immunology, research, genre, perversity, arrest, revelation, executability, recognition, perseverance
Art's recent infiltration of stock markets, courtrooms, and mobile phones marks a seismic shift in the role it plays in society. The once-academic question "what is art" has acquired new urgency now that society depends on this collective immune system to confront technology's increasing encroachment into daily life. Drawing on case studies from our 2006 book At the Edge of Art, this paper examines the special powers granted art of the Internet age, which--no longer content to sit on a pedestal or auction block--can respond aggressively to the ethical crises caused by technology's infection of society.
Chinese Archival Futures:Thinking Digitality Via Cornell's Wen and Goldsen Archives of New Media Art by Timothy Murray :: Chinese new media art, digitality, Archive Rose Goldsen, Archive of New Media Art Cornell University
Cornell University's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and its specialized collection, The Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant Garde Art, include an extensive array of new media art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In addition to artworks on CD-Rom, internet, and digital video, The Wen Pulin Archive includes 360 hours of digitized video documenting contemporary Chinese art events and installations since 1984. As the Founding Curator, I have been struck by how these collections and the socio-cultural conditions of their production have expanded my sense of the mission of the Goldsen Archive as well as the cultural conditions and promises of digitality itself.
Coming to Terms with the Digital Avant-Garde by Steve Anderson :: digital, avant-garde, design, music video, commercial art, new media, convergence
This paper maps two divergent trajectories within a narrowly defined sphere of short-form, time-based, digital media - specifically music videos, design-oriented short films and motion graphics - of the past ten years. I am particularly interested in considering this work's potential for understanding emergent relations to the perception and construction of space, time and bodies; the status of narrative; relations between technology and material culture; and shifting conceptions of the roles played by producers and consumers.
Community Networked Tales: Stories and Place of a Dublin by Valentina Nisi, Dr. Ian Oakley, Dr. Mads Haahr :: absence, community networks, memorials, communication, space, place
The paper Community Networked Tales: Stories and Place of a Dublin Neighborhood describes the content capture, design and implementation of the Media Portrait of the Liberties project. It focuses primarily on the results of a subjective user study conducted to gauge reactions to this novel media format. We close this paper by discussing the results of this study, and speculating on future directions for this work.
Device Art: A New Concept from Japan by Machiko Kusahara :: media art, technology, science, material, gadget, entertainment, toy, commercialism, product, movement, history, culture
In the international community of media art, Japanese media artists are often criticized for having positive attitude to technology rather than being critical. It is true that playfulness is often appreciated in Japanese media art, and there is no clear border between art and entertainment, or with popular culture. Why is that so? Is it wrong to appreciate technology? The paper discusses cultural and historical background of Japanese media art that leads to a proposal of "Device Art", a new concept in media art.
From Scenography to Planetary Network for Shanghai 2010 by Franck Ancel :: World-Expo City
Shanghai is in the process of becoming the Asian New York, at the heart of the continent. It is this urbanisation process, emerging in a city with no end and no limits, that is being discussed for 2010. Consequently, what is being prepared at Shanghai is not simply an immaterial bridge between a universal-type event and a planetary dimension. Similarly, the theme of the contemporary city is coming increasingly to the fore in exhibitions dedicated to the electronic arts, as at the forthcoming international ISEA gathering, to be held at San Jose in 2006. Some of these planned interactions between urban evolution and current techno-scientific developments constitute the linkage between today's artistic mutations.
Indigenous Domain: Beyond the Commons and Other Colonial Paradigms by Joline Blais :: indigenous, commons, internet, property, belonging, colonize, stories, networks, webs of trust, cyberspace
Indigenous Domain discusses the limitations of current colonial paradigms for cyberspace which try to rope off "commons" or "reservations" for the public good, but which still operate within a larger colonial framework. The paper proposes alternatives to the prevailing colonial paradigm of the "commons" and "copyleft" based on both indigenous models and new digital practices including "grounded stories," "indigenous networks," and "webs of trust." Finally, I look at a local Acess Grid art project in the Wabanaki community which combines all three of these indigenous/digital approaches.
Organised Networks, Distributive Education and New Institutional Forms by Ned Rossiter :: organised networks, distributive education, new institutional forms, collaborative transdisciplinary practices
Organised networks are emerging as the new institutional form best suited to address the uncertainties of labour and life in network societies and information economies.
Public Secrets: information and social knowledge by Sharon Daniel :: community, public domain, citizenship, information society, social justice, digital inclusion
Secrets are the opposite of information. There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are "public secrets" - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself - like, "don't ask, don't tell." Such shared secrets sustain social and political institutions. The injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are "public secrets". This paper will discuss the phenomenon of the "public secret" in the context information culture and present strategies for using information technologies to unmask such secrets. The presentation will reference an online audio database of statements by incarcerated women and injection drug users, which reveal the secret injustices of the war on drugs, the Criminal Justice System and the Prison Industrial Complex.
Redefining The Basemap by Alison Sant :: mapping, basemap, collaborative mapping, locative media
Current collaborative mapping projects, using locative media technologies, have often overlooked the conventions of the basemap as a site for reinvention. Although these projects imagine alternative organizations of urban space through the way it is digitally mapped, they remain bounded by datasets that reinforce a Cartesian and static notion of urban space. This paper questions the methodology of the basemap, as it is utilized in these projects, and proposes alternative tactics for mapping the city.
The Participatory Challenge: Incentives for Online Collaboration by Trebor Scholz :: self-organized cultural projects, online collaboration, free cooperation, social software, mutual aid
Current debates focus too much on what social tools can do and not enough on the people who use them. Motivations of the multitudes who add content to online environments matter a great deal. What follows here are hands-on guidelines and an outline of preconditions for online participation. Terms like: involvement, turn taking, network, feedback, or distributed creativity1 are frequently applied to characterise this kind of social and cultural interaction.
The Urbane Potential of Public Screens for Interaction by Mirjam Struppek :: interactivity, digital displays, urban screens, public sphere, urban space, interactive facades, local culture, social sustainability, neighbourhood reactivation, urban communication
Urban Screens are digital displays in urban space being used in consideration of the wellbeing and sustainability of the urban society - Screens that support the idea of public space as space for creation and exchange of culture.
Towards New Class of Being - The Extended Body by Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr :: art and science, art and biology, new species, extended body, semi-living, partial life, tissue culture, tissue engineering
The biomass of disassociated living cells and tissues is in the thousands of tons. These fragments do not fall under current biological or cultural classifications. The notion of the extended body can be seen as a way to define this category of life, while at the same time attempting to destabilise some of the rooted perceptions of classification of living beings. The extend body can and is an amalgamation of the human extended phenotype with tissue life - a unfiled body for disembodied living fragments, an ontological device, set to draw attention to the need of re-examining current taxonomies and hierarchical perceptions of life.
Voice and Code: From Spoken Word and Song to Writing to Music to Code by Josephine Bosma :: language, voice, song, body, code, music, social, authorship, folk data
The relationship between code and language, cultures, and machine has started being analyzed quite profoundly the past few years, yet how does code relate to human voice? Code is an interesting mixture of human and machine languages, of social and mathematical communication. With the work of Florian Cramer as an inspiration and big influence I would like to speculate wildly about how code not only reflects a changing attitude in the transcription and creation of meaning (related to music, hypertext and computer screen based narratives), but also on how this in turn reverberates in the use of our human voice, specifically in the arts.
Media Referentiality: "Productive" Knowledge Networks in Experimental Arts by Mara Traumane :: Self-productive practices, interdisciplinary avant-garde, collaborative tools in new media, proximity, alternative history structures, content shortcuts, community effects, collective memory
The paper will examine the self-referentiality and tools for its development introduced by the avant-garde, experimental interdisciplinary arts movements and will follow these practices in new media. It will survey how theoretical and artistic self-referencing in variety of media have had been a constitutive part of historic collaborative movements. A chapter will be devoted to New Media and will see internet and tools like mailing lists, blogs, wikis and ad-hoc networks as multimedia platforms for self-referentiality. The paper will argue that self-referentiality differs from independent media as it is rather serving as a tool of the internal dialogue, creative collaborative co-production, and invention of new vocabulary.
Sources: intelligent agent Vol. 6 No. 2 and ISEA 2006
Posted by jo at August 3, 2006 02:52 PM
