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August 14, 2006

after ISEA






Looking back to look forward

The final transmission of the San Jose to the World project, which sent subscription content directly to your phone or email, writes: Z1 ends. ISEA stakeholders disperse to destinations worldwide. Last minute meetings suggest future gatherings to follow.

The pithy, haiku-like communiqué suggests the reflection and continuing dialogue that ISEA / Zero 1 has generated. (And the attendant illustrative video suggests that much can yet be done with this technology in the name of art and activism....)

The current iDC thread continues this discussion, critiquing the spirit of play which feels increasingly oriented towards middle-class consumer spectacle and the experience economy.

Questions posed in the iDC discussion: is psychogeography/locative media work simply R&D for a new generation of entertainment spectacle? Or, what are we actually trying to do with these ideas of "play" in urban space? Who gets to play? And what about the interactive cities in Iraq and Lebanon and elsewhere? Why didn't we address war, security, militarization and terrorism as aspects of the contemporary interactive city? For me, running around making the city into a sandbox, a playground or a playing field feels increasingly irrelevant and irresponsible.

Though the iDC thread focuses on the Interactive City events, another post-ISEA discussion, on empyre for the month of August, continues the dialogue of the Pacific Rim New Media summit and begins with the Raqs Media Collective presentation Pacific Parables. They pose broad questions that engage the questions above:

So much of the discourse about information technology and communication is about light, about transparency and knowledge that we forget that information is crucial for the manufacture of disinformation. We are thinking right now of the enormous energy that is being put into the media, electronic, online and print, all over the world, but also especially here, in the United States, in justifying the naked aggression that the State of Israel is inflicting on the people of Lebanon. How can we begin to talk about the dark matter of information, or disinformation, and the political management of information, or at least with as much attention and energy as we do about information enlightenment? How can we render the deep and the dark in our work with light?

Posted by michelle at August 14, 2006 07:44 PM

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