ISEA2011 Presentation Overview


ISEA2011:  [Overview] [Venues] [Presentations] [Workshops] [Art Events] [Gallery]

  • Keynotes:

    Paper Presentations:

    Panels:

    • 6×6/36: An Artists Book/Exhibition project
    • The French-based Col­lec­tif NUNC is happy to launch the first el­e­ment of the 6×6/36 artists book/ex­hi­bi­tion pro­ject from the I Wish You Were Here! se­ries, a cre­atively dri­ven pro­ject aimed at re-think­ing a new way to ex­hibit media art. 6×6/36 con­sists of six note­books and six sets of stick­ers by 36 artists, and in­cludes a total of 144 art­works in a pur­posely de­signed box. The first issue deals with the theme of mo­bil­ity and will be pub­lished by Subjec­tile. [READ MORE]

      • (he)artbreaking to the core: zombie data and the arts of re/de/transcoding
    • Dig­i­tal corpses all abound, zom­bie data that is still there, but can­not be per­formed any­more. Change is in­evitable, if the art­work should sur­vive. Be­sides the archivists’ ef­forts to re­vive the work in its orig­i­nal state, artists have de­vel­oped their own strate­gies of em­brac­ing the er­rors and glitches of re/de/transcod­ing processes. Codecs, pro­grams, pro­to­cols and for­mats that are not sup­ported any­more have be­come cre­ative chal­lenges and often ini­ti­ate sub­ver­sive prac­tices. Not THAT, but HOW a work is changed and dis­torted be­comes the choice of the artist. In this process, the orig­i­nal and its res­ur­rec­tion enter a di­a­logue and open up ques­tions that go be­yond the sur­face, a di­alec­tics of orig­i­nal and copy, same­ness and change, ob­so­les­cence and progress, mem­ory and for­get­ting, sur­vival and death. And as the orig­i­nal (file) is dead, the orig­i­nal (as a con­cept) is re­born at the same time. Artis­tic strate­gies of re/de/transcod­ing and serendipi­dous er­rors are po­si­tioned as an an­tithe­sis to an elit­ist or naive eu­pho­ria of con­st... [READ MORE]

      • @China, Virtually Speaking: A Virtual Roundtable Discussion on Emergent Practices in China
    • “@China, Vir­tu­ally Speak­ing” lever­ages on­line and vir­tual plat­forms to bring to­gether a group of ge­o­graph­i­cally dis­persed art and de­sign col­lec­tives and in­di­vid­u­als through­out China to re­flect on the topic of “open source”. In this vir­tual round table dis­cus­sion, pan­elists will ad­dress how no­tions of “open source” are being trans­lated and ap­plied cross-cul­tur­ally to gen­er­ate new mod­els of cul­tural pro­duc­tion and so­cial prac­tice within the po­lit­i­cal and eco­nomic bound­aries of China. For par­tic­i­pants not phys­i­cally pre­sent at the con­fer­ence, the di­a­logue will be en­abled through a live stream of Skype video and the vir­tual en­vi­ron­ment of Sec­ond Life. The art and de­sign col­lec­tives in­vited to par­tic­i­pate on this panel are all chal­leng­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of what has be­come a highly com­mer­cial­ized art mar­ket and cor­po­ra­tized cre­ative in­dus­try in China through their cul­ti­va­tion of col­lab­o­ra­tive al­ter­na­tive spaces and un­con­ven­tional ex­hi­bi­tion and dis­cur­sive plat­forms. Pa... [READ MORE]

      • An Alembic of Transformation: Virtual Reality as Agent of Change
    • We have come to rec­og­nize the vast po­ten­tial of Vir­tual Re­al­ity en­vi­ron­ments as pow­er­ful agents of change, both on a per­sonal as well as on a so­cially in­ter­ac­tive level. Thus, this panel will dis­cuss the im­ple­men­ta­tion of Vir­tu­al­ity Re­al­ity tech­nolo­gies in the fields of heal­ing and of per­sonal growth, learn­ing, as well as an all im­por­tant re-cap­tur­ing of po­ten­tially lost adult play­ful­ness through three di­men­sional vir­tual pres­ence and im­mer­sion. In this panel we pro­pose to look at Vir­tual Re­alites in their on­line as well as stand­alone man­i­fes­ta­tions with a spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tion for its ca­pa­bil­i­ties in pro­duc­ing emo­tional, per­cep­tual, be­hav­ioral changes in their users. That these changes ex­tend be­yond the ac­tual im­mer­sion and con­tinue into the every­day ex­is­tence of par­tic­i­pa­tors has been pre­vi­ously es­tab­lished by Yee and Bailen­son (2007). Be­yond their con­sid­er­able per­sua­sive ca­pa­bilites as we know them today, look­ing into the fu­ture, Biocca (1997) dis­cusses the pos­si­bil­ity of de... [READ MORE]

      • Arabesque, Mandala, Algorithm: A Long History of Generative Art
    • This panel will in­ves­ti­gate the his­tory of ab­stract mov­ing image work from early com­puter films, to the first video syn­the­sizer im­ages, to cur­rent work in gen­er­a­tive, al­go­rith­mic art. Un­like typ­i­cal im­ages de­rived from film and video, which cap­ture in­dex­i­cal traces of the scenes and ob­jects in front of their lenses, these works gen­er­ate im­agery with­out ref­er­ents and often with­out cam­eras. Early com­puter an­i­ma­tions ex­per­i­mented with the trans­la­tion of code into graph­ics, video syn­the­siz­ers mapped elec­tric im­pulses di­rectly onto the scrolling field of the cath­ode ray tube, where as gen­er­a­tive art uses com­pu­ta­tional al­go­rithms to de­fine a set of rules which au­to­mat­i­cally set into mo­tion and ever chang­ing vi­sual land­scape. The pa­pers on this panel chal­lenge the par­tic­u­lar model of vi­su­al­ity pro­posed by a tra­di­tional un­der­stand­ing of film. They trace out a long his­tory of gen­er­a­tive art, root­ing new media prac­tices in ex­per­i­men­tal work of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The work of John and James Whit­ney, Step... [READ MORE]

      • Art as Media as Display: Biennials as Platform for Social Change
    • Oc­cur­ring within the scope of the 12th Is­tan­bul Bi­en­nial Par­al­lel Events and ISEA2011 A dis­cus­sion in two ses­sions on the oc­ca­sion of the 12th Is­tan­bul Bi­en­nial and ISEA2011 at the Con­sulate Gen­eral of The King­dom of The Nether­lands, Istanbul. Today the trend in art and crit­i­cal the­ory often pre­sents a pro­gram fo­cus­ing on so­cial is­sues and con­cerns rather than aes­thet­ics. The con­tem­po­rary bi­en­nial, one of the hy­per­tro­phied ex­hi­bi­tion plat­forms of our global pre­sent, serves as the locus op­ti­mus for this focus. This type of ex­hi­bi­tion has be­come a stage for artists, cu­ra­tors and spec­ta­tors to re­flect and spec­u­late on our cur­rent con­di­tion. But has art be­come solely a ve­hi­cle for so­cial com­men­tary? And what is the role of the media in art prac­tice and ex­hi­bi­tion are­nas? How does media – in­clud­ing in­ter­net, twit­ter and so­cial net­works – serve as a tool for the art to con­vey larger is­sues? Does media de­moc­ra­tize our so­ci­ety, or is the de­moc­ra­ti­za­tion of media in fact a false­hood? The re-me­di... [READ MORE]

      • Beyond Locative: Media Arts after the Spatial Turn
    • In 2006 Var­nelis and Tuters pub­lished “Be­yond Loca­tive Media”, which dis­cussed the emer­gence of loca­tive media as “the next big thing”. Five years on, with the ubiq­uity of iphones, loca­tive media has be­come banal. Loca­tive media had been much an­tic­i­pated within the media art world, no­tably at the ISEA symposia in 2004 & 2006 after which it en­tered pop­u­lar cul­ture as a trope in William Gib­son’s last two nov­els. Yet while it may have faded from the avant-garde, there is a thriv­ing loca­tive dis­course in aca­d­e­mic jour­nals, as­so­ci­ated with the “spa­tial turn” in media stud­ies. This panel con­sid­ers the role of loca­tive media in the arts and hu­man­i­ties dis­course. The afore­men­tioned text framed loca­tive media in terms of neo-Sit­u­a­tion­ist tac­tics which sought to ac­tively imag­ine an al­ter­nate city. While loca­tive prac­ti­cioners did not share the op­po­si­tional pol­i­tics of their net art pre­cur­sors, one can not help but won­der if some greater po­ten­tial for the medium has not per­haps been fore­closed by a par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture that sug­gests l... [READ MORE]

      • BioARTCAMP: Laboratory Ecologies in the Wild West
    • Biotech­nol­ogy forces a restag­ing of the ecol­ogy of our re­la­tions with other species: with biotech­nol­ogy we are now able to breed, to birth, gen­er­a­tional life forms that serve as tools, sub­jects and em­bod­ied tech­nolo­gies that in turn in­ter­act with and alter our bod­ies, and the planet’s ecol­ogy. This panel will pro­pose al­ter­na­tive mod­els (artis­tic and the­o­ret­i­cal) to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal metaphors in de­scrib­ing biotech­no­log­i­cal pro­to­cols. Draw­ing upon the trans­for­ma­tive power of bioart in cre­at­ing new con­cep­tual and prac­ti­cal tools found in bi­o­log­i­cal ma­te­ri­al­ity, our dis­cus­sion will re­volve around a large col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­ject called BioART­CAMP. BioART­CAMP is best de­scribed as a bioart camp­ing ex­pe­di­tion in the Cana­dian Rocky Moun­tains where the Rock­ies will serve as a dra­matic in­car­na­tion of an ex­ter­nal ecol­ogy for six artists, two sci­en­tists and two the­o­rists to build a work­ing biotech lab­o­ra­tory as part of a du­ra­tional per­for­mance. Bioart in­trin­si­cally in­vites us t... [READ MORE]

      • Body Image to/from Media: Rethinking Japanese Avant-Garde Art
    • What was the crit­i­cal point of Japan­ese post­war avant-garde art when re-look­ing today’s art scene? How have they in­flu­enced con­tem­po­rary art, cul­ture, and so­ci­ety until pre­sent? Through these pre­sen­ta­tions, the im­por­tance of Japan­ese post­war avant-garde art will be clar­i­fied and how they af­fected the cur­rent art will be dis­cussed in de­tail. Three top­ics will be pre­sented to re­con­sider the body image in con­tem­po­rary arts, es­pe­cially from the view of media and the art as a per­for­mance. The work of At­suko Tanaka from GUTAI, Kat­suhiro Ya­m­aguchi and the work of Kenji Yanobe will be ex­am­ined. The first pre­sen­ta­tion will mainly focus on the work of At­suko Tanaka (1932-2005), one of the main artists of GUTAI move­ment that oc­curred in west­ern re­gion of Japan in 1950’s. By an­a­lyz­ing her works from cul­tural and so­ci­o­log­i­cal con­text, flu­id­ity and am­bi­gu­ity in gen­der and the body within the con­text of cur­rent media art will be ex­am­ined. Re-think­ing early emer­gence of Japan­ese post­war art and fo­cus­ing on the ge­neal­ogy of con­te... [READ MORE]

      • Borders and interfaces: the challenges of the wearable computer’s design in the near future
    • The wear­able com­put­ing is a knowl­edge area in con­stant de­vel­op­ment, evok­ing sig­nif­i­cant trans­for­ma­tions on human/ma­chine com­mu­ni­ca­tion to con­fig­ure an ef­fec­tive and af­fec­tive in­ter­face. Those tech­no­log­i­cal arte­facts have aug­mented the per­sonal bound­aries re­design­ing the cor­po­real schema and lived ex­pe­ri­ences of bod­ily spa­tial­ity. So, the user’s body is be­yond act­ing the sup­port for those com­put­ers un­der­stood as a phys­i­cal re­al­ity tech­no­log­i­cally me­di­ated elab­o­rat­ing be­hav­iours and sen­sory-mo­tor skills, which works as es­sen­tial data for recog­ni­tion of own pref­er­ences. Those in­for­ma­tion ex­changes be­tween bi­o­log­i­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems have con­structed pos­si­ble di­a­logues evok­ing ques­tions and point­ing out chal­lenges. The panel with a con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous per­spec­tive about the cre­ation and the de­vel­op­ment of wear­able com­put­ers con­cerns with the main as­pects of those processes: the de­sign, cre­ation, in­no­va­tion, mo­bil­ity, us­abil­ity and er­g... [READ MORE]

      • Chasing Ghosts: Reactive Notation and Extreme Sight Reading
    • Over the last decade, a grow­ing num­ber of com­posers have begun to use what is known as real-time no­ta­tion in their work and many have de­vel­oped di­verse sys­tems to fa­cil­i­tate its use in all types of per­for­ma­tive sit­u­a­tions. Real-time music no­ta­tion in­cludes any no­ta­tion, ei­ther tra­di­tional or graphic, which is formed or cre­ated dur­ing the ac­tual per­for­mance. Other terms such as dy­namic music no­ta­tion, live scor­ing, vir­tual scor­ing, and re­ac­tive no­ta­tion have also been used to de­scribe the same process. This panel event seeks to con­vey the ex­cite­ment of cur­rent real-time no­ta­tion prac­tice to the pub­lic by pre­sent­ing work done in the area by promi­nent com­posers, mu­si­cians, and re­searchers. The pre­sen­ters will ex­plore key is­sues be­hind vir­tual scor­ing and real-time no­ta­tion from tech­ni­cal, mu­si­cal and de­sign per­spec­tives and pro­vide an overview of the var­i­ous ap­proaches, their sys­tems, and the styles of music that have emerged from them. Rel­e­vant works from the past and the pre­sent will be dis­cussed to show how real-time n... [READ MORE]

      • Code: Intellectual Property, Fair Use and Plagiarism – Open Discussion
    • In her book “My Mother was a Com­puter,” the­o­rist N. Kather­ine Hayles has writ­ten about the crit­i­cal dif­fer­ences be­tween nat­ural lan­guages and com­puter lan­guages. She writes, “…?code dif­fers from speech and writ­ing in that it ex­ists in clearly dif­fer­en­ti­ated ver­sions that are ex­e­cutable in a process that in­cludes hard­ware and soft­ware…” (Hayles 52). The rise of dig­i­tal arts within aca­d­e­mic pro­grams has meant that many more peo­ple are now learn­ing how to pro­gram and write code. Within the dig­i­tal arts, pro­gram­ming is most often taught through code sam­ples, tu­to­ri­als, mod­i­fi­ca­tion and adap­ta­tion. But this prac­tice can be­come prob­lem­atic as we try to lo­cate in­tel­lec­tual prop­erty through reg­u­la­tory prac­tices de­signed for nat­ural lan­guage, like pla­gia­rism, onto com­puter lan­guages. Pla­gia­rism is taken ex­tremely se­ri­ously within higher ed­u­ca­tion, but rules gov­ern­ing these prac­tices ex­hibit cer­tain fail­ings when ap­plied to non-nat­ural lan­guages. Within the hu­man­i­ties, there are nu­mer­ous and highly ... [READ MORE]

      • Compumorphic Art – The Computer as Muse
    • In this panel the term com­pumor­phic art will be used to de­scribe an emer­gent col­lec­tion of art­works, artists and pro­jects that repo­si­tion the dig­i­tal com­puter as a form of cre­ative in­spi­ra­tion, cul­tural com­men­tary or aes­thetic ref­er­ence. Through the pre­sen­ta­tion of their own re­search/prac­tice the panel will re­veal how com­pumor­phic art­works not only ref­er­ence the vi­sual aes­thetic of com­put­ing tech­nolo­gies but often uti­lize or ques­tion the cul­tural val­ues and on­to­log­i­cal qual­i­ties we com­monly as­cribe to the com­puter-dig­i­tal. How­ever, this term is by no means fully re­solved and it is hoped that a lively de­bate around the no­tion of com­pumor­phic art – what this might mean and what it might en­com­pass – will take place in the forum. [READ MORE]

      • Creativity as a Social Ontology
    • Whilst cre­ativ­ity is often per­ceived as the prod­uct of the in­di­vid­ual artist, or cre­ative en­sem­ble, it can also be con­sid­ered an emer­gent phe­nom­e­non of com­mu­ni­ties, dri­ving change and fa­cil­i­tat­ing in­di­vid­ual or en­sem­ble cre­ativ­ity. Cre­ativ­ity can be a per­for­ma­tive ac­tiv­ity re­leased when en­gaged through and by a com­mu­nity and un­der­stood as a process of in­ter­ac­tion. The model of the soli­tary artist, pro­duc­ing arte­facts that em­body cre­ativ­ity, can be con­tested as the ideal method to achieve cre­ative out­comes. The propo­si­tion is that cre­ativ­ity is an ac­tiv­ity of ex­change that en­ables peo­ple and com­mu­ni­ties. We do not pro­pose cre­ativ­ity as in­stru­men­tal, aris­ing from a per­ceived need and seek­ing to de­liver a so­lu­tion or prod­uct, nor as a sup­ply-side “blue skies” ideal, but as an emer­gent prop­erty of com­mu­ni­ties. John Searle de­fines so­cial on­tol­ogy as “both cre­ated by human ac­tions and at­ti­tudes but at the same time (hav­ing) an epis­tem­i­cally ob­jec­tive ex­is­tence and … part of t... [READ MORE]

      • Crisis Narrative of Landscape: Future Inherent
    • This panel ex­plores multi-di­men­sional works that in­ter­act and ex­plore the nar­ra­tives of dam­aged land­scapes -ur­ban and out­back scars found on and within the struc­tures of land and ar­chi­tec­ture and scars re­lated to the move­ment of peo­ples. The speak­ers will pre­sent their art­works de­vel­oped from the ev­i­dence of weather shifts that are woven through var­i­ous forms, in­clud­ing per­sonal doc­u­men­tary-style im­ages, GPS data and satel­lite im­agery.  These art­works use im­ages of the earth’s sur­face to ex­plore nar­ra­tives of po­ten­tial fu­tures. Within past and pre­sent ac­tions can be found a fu­ture that rev­els within the sense of be­long­ing. The fu­ture could be based within a con­tin­u­ing par­a­digm or shift into greater un­der­stand­ings of new and an­cient tech­nolo­gies that shift our po­ten­tial for cre­at­ing and in­vest­ing in a fu­ture vis­i­ble world. The pro­jected im­ages and con­text ex­pand the premise that tap­ping into the nar­ra­tive of place re­veals an un­der­stand­ing of a fu­ture plan. This el­e­ment be­gins to ques­tion and push the sci... [READ MORE]

      • Data Disinformation
    • The panel seeks to in­ves­ti­gate and re­visit the po­lit­i­cal role that art can play in sub­vert­ing stan­dard­ised vi­sual form and lan­guage. Data ma­nip­u­la­tion and vi­su­al­i­sa­tion con­tributes to a large part of con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal arts prac­tice. A ten­dency to sep­a­rate out frame­work/plat­form and con­tent has meant that analy­sis of the ma­te­r­ial of vi­sual forms that arise from artis­tic processes can be over­looked. This panel ex­am­ines di­verse ap­proaches to the ma­nip­u­la­tion and vi­su­al­i­sa­tion of data ap­pro­pri­ated by vi­sual artists. While the works pre­sented by the pan­el­lists are not overtly po­lit­i­cal, there is a strong pres­ence of chal­lenge to the vi­sual tropes used by those en­gaged in pro­duc­tion in an in­dus­try con­text such as film, gam­ing, jour­nal­ism and mar­ket­ing.  The panel seeks to in­ves­ti­gate and re­visit the po­lit­i­cal role that art can play in sub­vert­ing stan­dard­ised vi­sual form and lan­guage.  Pan­el­lists will be drawn from artists in the con­cur­rent Bro­ken Still­ness ex­hi­bi­tion at ISEA, who are ... [READ MORE]

      • Don’t Anthropomorpise Me: Electronic Performance Tools, Automatons and The Vanity Apocalypse
    • This panel ex­am­ines bots & au­tomata as sub­jects of cul­ture, with the par­tic­u­lar em­pha­sis on how we ex­pe­ri­ence and per­son­alise our in­ter­ac­tions with them. So­cia­ble robot de­vel­op­ment raises many ques­tions with re­gards to cul­tures of spir­i­tu­al­ity and ex­pres­sion.  The choice of en­cod­ing tool and in­ter­face are in­trin­sic to any com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­form, which al­ways gives rise to new sit­u­a­tions that must be tack­led. Cre­ative re­flec­tion and crit­i­cal in­tel­li­gent play has al­lowed for the nu­mer­ous syn­er­gies be­tween man and ma­chine and in­flu­ences how we are nat­u­rally in­clined to in­ter­act and use these new tech­nolo­gies, and how these in­ter­ac­tions im­pact on so­ci­ety.  Such di­verse views to­ward tech­nol­ogy are shaped by re­spec­tive so­cial his­to­ries, cul­tures and ex­pe­ri­ences.  Ro­bots have be­come cult ob­jects of con­tem­pla­tion, giv­ing us a sense of con­nect­ed­ness with the world around us.  Con­cep­tion of the other is formed by re­flec­tion of our pro­jected per­cep­tions and these per­sona... [READ MORE]

      • Don't Hate the Business, Become the Business!
    • The panel in­ves­ti­gates some of the in­ter­con­nec­tions be­tween art, ac­tivism and busi­ness. “Don’t hate the media, be­come the media”, was one of the slo­gans of In­dy­media. We are ap­ply­ing this crit­i­cal hands-on per­spec­tive to the busi­ness frame­work. Pre­sen­ters ex­am­ine how artists, rather than re­fus­ing the mar­ket, are pro­duc­ing crit­i­cal in­ter­ven­tions from within. As the dis­tinc­tion be­tween pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion ap­pears to have col­lapsed, every in­ter­ac­tion in the info-sphere seems to have be­come a busi­ness op­por­tu­nity. There­fore, the cre­ative in­ter­sec­tions be­tween busi­ness and art be­come a cru­cial ter­ri­tory for re-in­ven­tion and the rewrit­ing of sym­bolic and cul­tural codes, gen­er­at­ing po­lit­i­cal ac­tions or so­cial hacks that use a deep level of irony, but also un­ex­pected con­se­quences. The tac­tics demon­strate the per­me­abil­ity of sys­tems — that these can be re­worked — and more so, that rad­i­cal in­no­va­tion re­quires mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the pre­vail­ing busi­ness logic.  The back­drop of t... [READ MORE]

      • Emotion Studies in a Contemporary Art Debate
    • With­out doubt emo­tions are evolv­ing as they are in­flu­enced by cul­ture, con­text and be­hav­iour. David Mat­sumoto (2007) elu­ci­dates these three in­flu­ences on human emo­tion. West­ern and East­ern so­ci­eties have wit­nessed change with the use of new tech­nolo­gies. Will our abil­ity to read emo­tional ex­pres­sions slowly change with the new com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems? Might peo­ple soon no longer be able to read fa­cial ex­pres­sions? With the loss of the abil­ity to read an emo­tion might come too the loss of the ex­pe­ri­ence it­self?  Steven Pinker (2002, p.40) stresses that emo­tions and be­hav­iour al­ways rep­re­sent an “in­ter­nal strug­gle”. It is not merely cul­ture and so­ci­ety that di­rects human be­hav­iour, but the mind has an in­nate sys­tem that gen­er­ates end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties to choose from.  Emo­tions and feel­ings have been stud­ied by some im­por­tant re­searchers in the field, in­clud­ing Dar­win, Dama­sio, LeDoux, and Ekman. The dis­cus­sion can now be ex­panded to in­clude emo­tion re­search and emo­tional re­sponses in Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gen... [READ MORE]

      • New Environmental Art Practices on Landscapes of the Polar Regions; Politics, Emotion and Culture (FARFIELD 1)
    • Ques­tions of sub­jec­tiv­ity re­lated to gen­der, race, emo­tion, and per­cep­tion usu­ally do not fac­tor into think­ing about polar cli­mate sci­ence. This panel ex­plores cli­mate change and the en­vi­ron­ment as well as the land­scapes of the polar re­gions and geopol­i­tics in terms of shifts in aware­ness that in­form how we think about, act about, and set pol­icy for deal­ing with these global re­gions. Pol­i­tics, emo­tion and cul­ture are sig­nif­i­cant in­di­ca­tors for un­der­stand­ing the his­tory and pre­sent uses of the Arc­tic and the Antarc­tic, how sci­ence and data gath­ered in these re­gions is per­ceived today, and the re­sult­ing im­pact on prac­ti­cal pol­icy mat­ters re­lated to cli­mate change. This panel is a com­pan­ion panel to Far Field 2 and takes up some of the same is­sues but em­pha­sizes the con­nec­tion to the colo­nial his­to­ries of these re­gions, the tech­no­log­i­cal in­cor­po­ra­tions of tra­di­tional knowl­edge into data, as well as con­tem­po­rary ap­proaches to art about land­scapes that deal with is­sues of pol­i­tics, emo­tion, and cul­ture. The pa... [READ MORE]

      • The Data Landscapes of Climate Change (FARFIELD 2)
    • In re­cent years the sci­ence and data of cli­mate sci­ence has come under un­prece­dented pub­lic scrutiny. This politi­ciza­tion of cli­mate data, whilst po­ten­tially dan­ger­ous, of­fers op­por­tu­ni­ties for us to re-think our re­la­tion­ships to sci­ence and de­velop dis­cus­sion around in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary art/sci­ence ap­proaches to our chang­ing en­vi­ron­ment. In this spirit the panel will ex­plore how cli­mate data op­er­ates as a so­cial and cul­tural phe­nom­e­non with cre­ative af­for­dances be­yond nor­ma­tive sci­en­tific and in­sti­tu­tional frames and prac­tices. Panel mem­bers from artis­tic and sci­en­tific com­mu­ni­ties will pre­sent col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­jects, the­o­ret­i­cal elab­o­ra­tions and vi­sual and sonic ex­per­i­men­ta­tions that ex­plore the fol­low­ing ques­tions: What data dri­ven ap­proaches to rep­re­sent­ing cli­mate change in the arts exist; what are the fu­ture pos­si­bil­i­ties?
      1. What method­olog­i­cal and con­cep­tual chal­lenges do art/sci­ence col­lab­o­ra­tors using cli­mate data con­front?
      2. Are ex­i... [READ MORE]

        3. From New Media to Old Utopias: ‘Red’ Art in Late Capitalism?
      3. From the early stages of its de­vel­op­ment, New Media Art read­ily adopted a va­ri­ety of means of artis­tic en­gage­ment and ex­pres­sion that aim at serv­ing modes of utopian so­cial being: from multi-modal col­lab­o­ra­tion to mass par­tic­i­pa­tion and from open soft­ware to hack­tivism, the germs of left­ist utopian thought seem to abound in the art of the Dig­i­tal Age. It ap­pears that New Media Art in­creas­ingly em­ploys new tech­nolo­gies in order to pen­e­trate all as­pects of global so­cial liv­ing and prop­a­gate such prac­tices as cat­a­lysts for change. It has grad­u­ally be­come part of an ide­ol­ogy whose ob­jec­tives al­lude to utopian the­o­ries of so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion lying closer to cer­tain vi­sions of com­mu­nism, than to the re­al­i­ties of late cap­i­tal­ism within which new media op­er­ate. This panel ses­sion in­tends to in­ves­ti­gate the rel­e­vance of com­mu­nist utopi­anism to New Media Art’s ide­o­log­i­cal dis­po­si­tions, as a start­ing point from which wider po­lit­i­cal, so­cial and cul­tural im­pli­ca­tions of New Media Art could be ex­plore... [READ MORE]

        4. Games Betwixt and Between
      4. This panel fo­cuses on some of the most in­ter­est­ing de­vel­op­ments in games and playable media. More specif­i­cally it will look at the re­cent surge in mak­ing in­de­pen­dent games or game-like media art and ar­ti­facts. How does the indie mo­ment in the games in­dus­try in­ter­sect with the rise of in­ter­est in playable media out­side the in­dus­try (art games, game art, games as re­search, em­bod­ied play, new ar­cade games, lo-fi and retro games, diy….)?  Pan­elists will pro­vide a broad overview of cur­rent “gami­ness” but will also be draw­ing on ex­am­ples of their own art/de­sign work. Pa­pers will ad­dress the fol­low­ing types of ques­tions:
        1. The re­la­tion be­tween goal-based and free play mod­els of games/playable media, as well ex­am­ples of de­sign­ing for ap­pro­pri­a­tion. What is the re­la­tion be­tween ex­pres­siv­ity and rules? Whose ex­pres­siv­ity? What does/could it mean to au­thor playable media for ap­pro­pri­a­tion? (Lynn Hughes)
        2. The rise of lo-fi games in the light of V.W Turner’s no­tions of the lim­i­nal & lim­i­noid. Con­tem­po­rary ind... [READ MORE]

          3. How dare you? Acts of Deviance and Strategies of Discreditation
        3. A vi­o­la­tion of the norm whether in­tended or by chance en­tails the dan­ger of fac­ing pun­ish­ment ei­ther through law en­force­ment, vi­o­lent re­sponse, stigma­ti­za­tion as ‘de­viant’ or ab­hor­rence by so­ci­ety. Gen­er­ally acts of de­viance mark in­fringe­ments of es­tab­lished pat­terns. How­ever linked to the no­tion of in­tended de­viancy being in fact an al­leged de­viance as an at­tempt to at­tract au­di­ences or con­sumers. De­viancy ap­pears to pos­sess the po­ten­tial be used as a method to gen­er­ate an image, such as giv­ing a brand a dash of re­bel­lious­ness by at­tribut­ing de­viance to it. De­viancy can be em­ployed by oth­ers as a de­scrip­tion, as well as it can be used as a self-de­scrip­tion (for eco­nom­i­cal rea­sons for in­stance). In con­trast to de­viancy that can be used ex­ter­nally and in­ter­nally, dis­cred­i­ta­tion is a per­for­ma­tive act of as­crip­tion by oth­ers. A key in­ten­tion of dis­cred­i­ta­tion seems to be the in­tended dam­age of the ‘good’ rep­u­ta­tion of some­one or some­thing. Dis­cred­i­ta­tion hap­pens on pur­pose. ... [READ MORE]

          4. Hybrid Cultures
        4. Hy­brid cul­tures are phe­nom­ena of es­sen­tial con­nec­tions in the pre­sent. They emerge from di­verse and com­plex in­flu­ences. Hy­brid cul­tures are merg­ers that com­bine past and pre­sent, local and translo­cal, space and place and technoscape. Hy­brid­ity is ex­pressed in var­i­ous cul­tural con­texts and in the in-be­tween spaces of arts, media, sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. Under the sign of the dig­i­tal and the global, hy­brid­ity con­notes a cul­tural man­i­fes­ta­tion of mul­ti­ple ap­pear­ances, as in cy­ber­space and mul­ti­ple selves. We apply the term hy­brid cul­tures to the con­tem­po­rary in­ter-con­nect­ed­ness that de­rives from the tech­no­log­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties of merg­ing vir­tual worlds and real life ex­pe­ri­ence and to art prac­tices that in­sti­gate cre­ative in(ter)ven­tion into our global media pre­sent, as well as to sci­en­tific re­search that aims to blur the bound­aries be­tween human and ma­chine,  sci­ence and sci­ence fic­tion. In ap­ply­ing the term hy­brid cul­tures, we pro­pose to dis­cuss a crit­i­cal con­cept of hy­brid­ity that in­ter-re... [READ MORE]

          5. Hybrid Spatial Experiences
        5. Key Areas to be ad­dressed: 1) Artists use of lo­ca­tion-aware mo­bile com­mu­ni­ca­tion in pub­lic space linked with so­cial media. Q How can we as artists ad­e­quately un­der­stand the chang­ing na­ture of  per­va­sive and  mo­bile media? 2) Artists recre­at­ing a sense of ‘place’ with emer­gent per­va­sive tech­nolo­gies. Per­va­sive media is suc­cess­fully en­rich­ing place with in­for­ma­tion and so­cial net­works, but these mes­sages don’t nec­es­sar­ily add artis­tic or so­cial mean­ing to those spaces, thereby cre­at­ing place out of space. We live in a world of lost his­to­ries-artists can re­frame these in new ways for the pub­lic, the prob­lem­atic is how this dif­fers from any tra­di­tional pub­lic art prac­tice. Q: If per­va­sive media al­lows the in­for­ma­tional en­rich­ment of space, can we also en­able the pub­lic to do this for them­selves through processes which are not de­ter­mined in a top-down, but in a bot­tom-up man­ner? Q: Can the use of per­va­sive media, through such processes, re­veal new as­pects of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion, new pat­terns and dy­nam­ics of... [READ MORE]

          6. If You See Something Say Something: Art, War, Surveillance and the Sustainability of Urgency in the Post 9/11 Era
        6. This panel will pro­vide an op­por­tu­nity for the ex­am­i­na­tion of po­lit­i­cally mo­ti­vated, media based prac­tices as we move into the sec­ond decade after the 9/11 at­tacks and the re­sult­ing War on Ter­ror. The in­di­vid­u­als in­volved in this panel have been in­stru­men­tal in defin­ing the use and dis­sem­i­na­tion of tac­ti­cal media prac­tices that have res­onated widely in the cul­tural sphere by con­fronting is­sues of war, mem­ory, ter­ror­ism and sur­veil­lance. The panel pro­vides a cru­cial and timely con­text for these cre­ative prac­ti­tion­ers and noted schol­ars to dis­cuss the ef­fi­cacy of such on­go­ing ef­forts of en­gage­ment in works that seek to in­ter­vene in our con­tem­po­rary po­lit­i­cal con­text. This will be an op­por­tu­nity for crit­i­cal dis­course by these pan­elists and the panel at­ten­dees to con­sider the evo­lu­tion and adap­ta­tion of these ideas in light of the chal­lenges to sus­tain­ing a level of ur­gency in such po­lit­i­cally ac­tivist cre­ative prac­tice – as con­flict, ter­ror and fear have come to typ­ify the sta­tus quo. [READ MORE]

          7. Interart / Intersensorium. On the Interrelation of Media and the Senses
        7. In­ter­art Stud­ies has es­tab­lished it­self as a field wherein schol­ars from a va­ri­ety of dis­ci­plines an­a­lyze the in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween dif­fer­ent art forms based on his­tor­i­cally di­ver­gent con­cepts of mono- and in­ter­me­di­al­ity. In­ter­me­di­al­ity, in turn, de­notes in­ter­re­lated strate­gies of dif­fer­ent media de­signs that gen­er­ate new forms of pre­sen­ta­tion and re­cep­tion modes – modes that amount to more than just an ac­cu­mu­la­tion of the media in­volved. To cite one ex­am­ple: the in­te­gra­tion of film/video in some the­atre per­for­mances today merges 3-D-(the stage) and 2-D-(the screen) tech­nolo­gies. This in­ter­re­la­tion not only changes the stage de­sign, but also af­fects the ac­tors’ per­for­mances as they in­ter­act with each other while main­tain­ing vis­i­bil­ity in front of the screen. This si­mul­tane­ity de­mands in­creased at­ten­tion to both nat­ural (the co-ac­tors) and tech­ni­cal media (film/video) – and, by de­fault, the same ap­plies to the re­cep­tion modes of the au­di­ence. Con­se­quently, the no­tion of in­te... [READ MORE]

          8. Interface Play: Media Environments for Ludic Cyborgs
        8. This panel of the Ludic In­ter­faces Re­search Group (L.I.R.G.) re­volves around the cur­rent state of re­search into ludic in­ter­faces, i.e. play­ful in­ter­ac­tion spaces, a term that was coined at ISEA2007 and ISEA2008. It will give a work­ing de­f­i­n­i­tion of this core con­cept that is the ker­nel of a new re­search field, map out its de­vel­op­ment and pre­sent state of the art hy­pothe­ses.  The premise of L.I.R.G. is that in­ter­face in­no­va­tions and their prop­a­ga­tion – one only needs to re­mem­ber the ge­neal­ogy of graph­i­cal user in­ter­faces – have their roots in play­ful­ness. Ludic in­ter­faces are con­crete, sit­u­ated in­ter­faces in which the play­ful po­ten­tial in­her­ent in all in­ter­faces man­i­fests it­self. This po­ten­tial stems from the fact that all in­ter­faces are by de­f­i­n­i­tion in­ter­me­di­ary zones that exist be­tween het­ero­ge­neous di­men­sions. This is es­pe­cially true with re­gards to com­puter-based in­ter­faces. Play po­tency is an es­sen­tial qual­ity of the dig­i­tal medium. Not only can it, given the nec­es­sary in­ter­face pro... [READ MORE]

          9. Intimate TV: Webcamming & Social Life-logging In the Surveillant-Sousveillant Space
        9. For this panel we pro­pose to re­flect upon the prac­tice of dig­i­tal per­for­mance with the use of we­b­cams, ad­dress­ing is­sues of in­ti­macy in the net­work. We­b­cam­ming refers to the use of we­b­cams to stream live from per­sonal en­vi­ron­ments to the in­ter­net, and de­velop life-logs that archive such prac­tices as on­line doc­u­men­ta­tions of the every­day. We­b­cam­ming prac­tices have been the­o­rised with dif­fer­ent re­sults from within the areas of dig­i­tal per­for­mance /cy­ber­for­mance. On the one hand, an his­tor­i­cal ac­count of dig­i­tal per­for­mance equates the use of we­b­cams in the hands of artists with the “sub­ver­sion of sur­veil­lance,” and an ironic ques­tion­ing of we­b­cam’s myths of au­then­tic­ity and im­me­di­acy. The field of cy­ber­for­mance, on the other hand, the­o­rises we­b­cam­ming in the con­text of in­creas­ing on­line par­tic­i­pa­tion, and the types of col­lab­o­ra­tions it fa­cil­i­tates within web 2.0 en­vi­ron­ments. How­ever, none of these analy­ses ad­dresses the in­creas­ing in­ti­macy fa­cil­i­tated by the ma... [READ MORE]

          10. La Plissure du Texte
        10. Roy As­cott’s ground­break­ing new media art work La Plis­sure du Texte (“The Pleat­ing of the Text”) was cre­ated in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art mod­erne de la Ville de Paris dur­ing that same year. The title of the pro­ject, “La Plis­sure du Texte: A Plan­e­tary Fairy Tale,” al­ludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a fa­mous dis­course on au­thor­ship, se­man­tic lay­er­ing, and the cre­ative role of the reader as the writer of the text. In 2010, La Plis­sure du Texte re-in­car­nated as a three di­men­sional, in­ter­ac­tive ar­chi­tec­ture cre­ated in the meta­verse and was pro­jected into Real Life in Seoul, Korea dur­ing the INDAF new media art fes­ti­val held at To­mor­row City, Songdo, In­cheon, through­out Sep­tem­ber 2010. Fol­low­ing As­cott’s orig­i­nal premise of dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, the fairy tale is now being told by a text dri­ven ar­chi­tec­ture within which a pop­u­la­tion of ro­botic avatars tells the tale through end­lessly gen­er­ated con­ver­sa­tions which are har­vested from the On­line Guten­berg Pro­ject. Ad­di­tion­ally, vi... [READ MORE]

          11. Mind the Gap
        11. MIND THE GAP play­fully al­ludes to trans­porta­tion, but ref­er­ences bor­ders and gaps of all kinds: ge­o­graphic, so­cial, and eco­nomic. This panel dis­cus­sion is aimed at in­ves­ti­gat­ing the var­i­ous ways con­tem­po­rary art is ad­dress­ing is­sues of eco­nomic and cul­tural glob­al­iza­tion, and urban mi­gra­tion within the artis­tic and so­cio-po­lit­i­cal tra­di­tions of Is­tan­bul and Turkey. MIND THE GAP pre­sent pa­pers and dis­cus­sions from in­ter­na­tional artists and schol­ars in re­ac­tion to the con­cepts of cap­i­tal­ism, con­sumerism and cul­tural im­pe­ri­al­ism, and the ways that we ne­go­ti­ate in­di­vid­ual and col­lec­tive iden­tity. MIND THE GAP draws from Nicholas Bour­ri­aud’s no­tion of the al­ter­mod­ern, which of­fers a new vi­sion of the mod­ern in which ideas of iden­tity are fluid rather than rooted in our ori­gins. With this spirit, MIND THE GAP asks the fol­low­ing ques­tions:
          1. In the face of global eco­nomic and en­vi­ron­men­tal crises, what op­tions do we have for a new vi­sion?
          2. What does na­tion­al­ity mean in a ho­mog­... [READ MORE]

            3. Motion Capture and Dance: what it can do, what it can’t do, and what it should never attempt
          3. Mo­tion cap­ture analy­sis of­fers dance new pos­si­bil­i­ties for re-con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing move­ment in ways that are not in­tu­itive, and not based on the tra­di­tions and in­grained move­ment gram­mars of spe­cific dance gen­res and styles. Look­ing at dance as mo­tion cap­ture data can pro­voke a more rad­i­cal de­con­struc­tion of ex­ist­ing move­ment dis­courses than is oth­er­wise pos­si­ble given the deep cor­po­real in­scrip­tions em­bed­ded in dancers’ and chore­o­g­ra­phers’ bod­ies. The flip side is that the vast vol­ume and de­tail of data mo­tion cap­ture gen­er­ates means that the pos­si­ble map­pings and or­ga­ni­za­tional par­a­digms mul­ti­ply ex­po­nen­tially.  De­cid­ing what to high­light and what to value, and what to con­sider ‘noise’ and ig­nore, is a crit­i­cal part of mo­tion cap­ture analy­sis. This in­escapable re­duc­tion­ism is also, how­ever, the an­tithe­sis of artis­tic method, which val­ues the whole, the ac­ci­den­tal, the in­clu­sive. Analy­sis forces choices based on value judg­ments, which have the po­ten­tial to dis­tort and close down, ... [READ MORE]

            4. NeuroArts
          4. Rather than con­sid­er­ing the aes­thet­ics of art and music as a way of ap­proach­ing an un­der­stand­ing of per­cep­tion and brain func­tion, Neu­roArts em­pha­sizes the di­rect use of Neu­ro­sci­en­tific mod­els and ma­te­ri­als in artis­tic prac­tice. In Neu­roArts, neu­rons and neu­ronal mod­els are ex­am­ined out­side of the body/brain em­pha­siz­ing an artis­tic-en­gi­neer­ing ap­proach with ei­ther the phys­i­cal ma­te­r­ial of brain, or the adap­ta­tion of bi­o­log­i­cal mod­els of spik­ing neu­rons. In using mod­els of spik­ing neu­rons within art, sound and music, the in­ter­nal struc­ture of the brain be­comes ex­ter­nal, its plas­tic­ity ex­posed, its path­ways and net­works mal­leable. This gives us a stand­point from which to crit­i­cally en­gage and ques­tion multi-scale con­cepts such as the im­por­tance of the cell, net­work topol­ogy and plas­tic­ity, self-hood, mem­ory and con­scious­ness. The first In­ter­na­tional Neu­roArts con­fer­ence out­lin­ing the new sub­ject area which took place in Feb­ru­ary 2011 at Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth. Neu­roArts at ISEA de­v... [READ MORE]

            5. New Media Archives- New Intelligent Ambiances
          5. This panel pre­sents a dig­i­tal art archives in­ves­ti­ga­tion high­light­ing the use of in­tel­li­gent sys­tems ap­pli­ca­tions in con­ser­va­tion, re­trieval, in­dex­ing or ac­cess forms re­lated to the artis­tic ob­ject ma­nip­u­la­tion. The main goal of the dis­cus­sion is to de­fine pa­ra­me­ters for non lin­ear sys­tems on the new media art in­for­ma­tion treat­ment. The prin­ci­ples for an in­tel­li­gent ma­chine and friendly in­ter­face to archives am­biance is still a the­ory. How­ever, the ap­pli­ca­tion of this con­cept on cur­rent plat­forms is a healthy mech­a­nism of tran­si­tion from lin­ear and se­man­tic struc­tures to a sym­bolic, non lin­ear and fuzzy logic sys­tem. Ma­chines do not have the cog­ni­tive de­vel­op­ment of hu­mans. They do not de­velop con­scious­ness or in­ten­tion­al­ity pred­i­cates yet. Nowa­days, the in­tel­li­gent ma­chine ap­pli­ca­tions aren’t sep­a­rated from human acts. These non lin­ear sys­tems and re­la­tions work as a frac­tal com­ple­ment for re­search and knowl­edge. Mem­ory is con­sid­ered not only by the pre­vi­ous con... [READ MORE]

            6. New Media Art Education in Central and Eastern Europe in the Last Two Decades: experiments and transition
          6. The panel will dis­cuss how the changes in East­ern and Cen­tral Eu­rope have in­flu­enced the art ed­u­ca­tional sys­tem there dur­ing the last twenty years, with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to ed­u­ca­tion in the new media field. The rea­son for choos­ing such a seem­ingly broad timescale is to in­clude the ‘fi­nal­i­sa­tion’ of the po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­i­cal in­te­gra­tion of some post-So­viet coun­tries (like Es­to­nia) into the Eu­ro­pean Union whilst con­trast­ing this with ex­am­ples like Be­larus, which have be­come (or re­mained) more au­to­cratic and closed. One par­tic­u­lar point of in­ter­est is the change in the un­der­stand­ing and in­ter­pre­ta­tion of ‘new media art’ dur­ing the last two decades, partly due to the dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies and spe­cial­i­ties that this field of prac­tice en­com­passes.
            1. Twenty years of change: in the po­lit­i­cal sys­tem, art par­a­digms, tech­nolo­gies and ways of think­ing
            2. Travel and tran­si­tion: ex­ported artists and im­ported ideas
            3. The tran­si­tion from arte­fact-based artis­tic prac­tice t... [READ MORE]

              4. On the Persistence of Hardware
            4. The sur­face of elec­tronic utopia is al­ways ma­te­r­ial.  Should a utopian no­tion ap­pear here for you to read, it would ap­pear on a hard sup­port which has had to be built, con­structed or oth­er­wise fab­ri­cated.  There­fore utopia is not just ‘con­tent’, imag­i­na­tion, ideas. Utopia al­ways has its ma­te­r­ial coun­ter­part which is today al­ways pred­i­cated on global in­dus­trial processes.  Any ap­pre­ci­a­tion of the eman­ci­pa­tory promise of elec­tronic media must in­te­grate a sober reck­on­ing of the in­tractable dif­fi­cul­ties on the ma­te­r­ial level of the tech­nol­ogy which should gen­er­ate this. This panel will take Kit­tler’s “There is no soft­ware” (Kit­tler 1995) to its eth­i­cal ex­treme, delv­ing the shad­ow­lands be­hind the bril­liance of elec­tronic cre­ativ­ity, to­wards an­other, par­al­lel and sym­bi­otic  cre­ativ­ity rooted in the sub­stances. The per­sis­tence of the ma­te­ri­al­ity of our world, and of the media we use to un­der­stand it, may be taken for granted, but mer­its more at­ten­tion.  De­spite the enor­mous power un­leashed by ou... [READ MORE]

              5. Open Culture + Wearables
            5. This panel will in­ves­ti­gate the in­flu­ence and im­por­tance of open cul­ture on wear­ables pro­duc­tion, dis­sem­i­na­tion and tech­no­log­i­cal craft­ing. Unit­ing prac­ti­tion­ers in the field of wear­ables who have worked on and with on­line plat­forms, open work­shop events, pub­li­ca­tions, hack spaces, uni­ver­sity class­rooms and media labs to ad­vance the pro­lif­er­a­tion of the craft of wear­ables, the panel will pre­sent case stud­ies for the spe­cific in­te­gra­tion of open cul­ture in the pro­duc­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion of wear­ables. The im­por­tance of DIY, open plat­forms, col­lab­o­ra­tive de­sign prac­tices and hack­ing in the ad­vance­ment of com­pu­ta­tional cou­ture has been key in prop­a­gat­ing the prac­tice and re­search into main­stream media, aca­d­e­mic cur­ricu­lums, arts and new media fes­ti­vals and pub­li­ca­tions. The hy­brid prac­tice of wear­ables – com­bin­ing techno-sci­en­tific knowhow with the skill of cou­ture fab­ri­ca­tion – pre­sents ex­cit­ing chal­lenges to both unique fields, en­cour­ag­ing the cross-pol­li­na­tion of art... [READ MORE]

              6. Patchwork Panel: Conceptualising Seams that Separate and Stitch Together
            6. The panel will ex­plore how mean­ing is cre­ated through the process of ar­rang­ing and re-ar­rang­ing frag­ments; how mean­ing is cre­ated through patches and quilt­ing. Our pro­posed for­mat is a patch­work panel, i.e. a con­ver­sa­tion be­tween knowl­edge­able peo­ple through story patch­work quilt­ing. The pan­elists, and other in­vited guests, pre­pare ”text-patches” as notes or re­minders of what to say. These text-patches – in paper or tex­tile in A4 for­mat – can have im­ages, con­cepts, words writ­ten or stitched on them. The text-patches are put on the floor in front of the au­di­ence. The work­ings of the sem­i­nar is such that none of the pan­elists can as­sume to put down all of the patches in her own pre­ferred order as this patch­work sem­i­nar for­mat pre­sup­poses that any­one could con­tinue on the thread of thoughts put down on the floor, and thus cre­at­ing a new pat­tern. Also, the au­di­ence is in­vited in­ter­act and in­ter­vene by putting down its own text-patches on the floor. Agenda:
              1. In­tro­duc­tion of the pan­elists.
              2. Lind­ström and Ståhl in­tro­duce the id... [READ MORE]

                3. Pervasive Media: Practice, Value, Culture
              3. Per­va­sive media is a new and de­vel­op­ing field; com­mis­sion­ers, brands, clients, fund­ing bod­ies often have dif­fi­culty grasp­ing its po­ten­tial. Very few media pro­fes­sion­als, let alone mem­bers of the pub­lic, un­der­stand what Per­va­sive Media is, or could be­come. We are at a new fron­tier. New, per­va­sive, ubiq­ui­tous and mo­bile tech­nolo­gies promise us an ever more con­nected world and the pos­si­bil­ity to ac­cess ever more de­tailed in­for­ma­tion about con­text. Al­though these promises con­tain dras­tic changes to media and tech­nol­ogy, they don’t en­gage with the nec­es­sary changes to the prac­tices of media pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion, tech­nol­ogy cre­ation and the com­mer­cial and prac­ti­cal re­al­i­ties that could make these promises a re­al­ity. These will be dras­ti­cally game chang­ing; cre­at­ing new busi­ness pos­si­bil­i­ties, whilst mak­ing oth­ers ob­so­lete. These promises, and changes, will be crit­i­cally ad­dressed dur­ing this panel. Per­va­sive ex­pe­ri­ences also re­quire a new, and sig­nif­i­cantly more di­verse, set of skills to i... [READ MORE]

                4. Playing for Keeps: Social Empowerment Through Physically Interactive Artworks
              4. This panel will pre­sent and dis­cuss meth­ods for cre­at­ing spon­ta­neous play­ful phys­i­cal and so­cial in­ter­ac­tion. The focus is on deep user in­ter­ac­tion with art­works using phys­i­cal com­put­ing meth­ods with an em­pha­sis on the con­struc­tion of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion within the group of par­tic­i­pants. What are the con­tex­tual and prac­ti­cal de­sign re­lated thresh­olds for will­ing­ness to in­ter­act and how can par­tic­i­pants be stim­u­lated to en­gage with the art­work? Does fa­mil­iar­ity with art, toys, com­puter games or music help to lower thresh­olds to un­der­stand­ing the in­ter­ac­tion? How does age, gen­der or cul­tural back­ground af­fect will­ing­ness to par­tic­i­pate in a dy­namic tem­po­rary com­mu­nity of pres­ence? The cre­ation of deep user in­ter­ac­tion with and through the art­works maybe in­sti­gated via novel ap­proaches to in­ter­face or by fresh ways of pre­sent­ing the art work to the viewer/par­tic­i­pants within the con­text of the art in­sti­tu­tion or in Pub­lic space. As tech­nol­ogy be­comes ubiq­ui­tous in so­ci­ety, artist... [READ MORE]

                5. Playing the non-playful: On the critical potential of play at the overlap of videogames and electronic art
              5. This panel pulls to­gether in­sights from game stud­ies, game de­sign, aes­thet­ics and new media the­ory to ex­am­ine the elu­sive con­cept of “play”. We as­sume com­mon base­line in the dis­tinc­tion be­tween play­ful­ness and playa­bil­ity, and trace the sig­nif­i­cance of these con­cepts to the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the player and the game. We look at the op­por­tu­ni­ties for self-dis­cov­ery, ex­is­ten­tial re­flec­tion and po­lit­i­cal and cul­tural cri­tique within this re­la­tion­ship. This panel, in­volv­ing ex­am­ples from the fringe ter­ri­tory be­tween com­mer­cial en­ter­tain­ment and artis­tic en­deav­ors, con­tributes to a re-po­si­tion­ing of com­puter games in re­la­tion to elec­tronic art, and fur­thers the de­vel­op­ment of crit­i­cal strate­gies for chart­ing the aes­thetic ter­ri­tory be­tween art, tech­nol­ogy and en­ter­tain­ment. [READ MORE]

                6. Public Art of the Sustainable City
              6. As we en­deavor to ex­tri­cate civ­i­liza­tion from fos­sil fuel de­pen­dence, the ex­is­ten­tial de­bate over the pur­pose of art de­serves re­newed at­ten­tion in the con­text of nat­ural ecol­ogy and human con­sump­tion. Is it pos­si­ble for works of pub­lic art to con­tribute ac­tively to the so­lu­tion to the prob­lems that con­front us? Can in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary art in­spire, through ex­am­ple, the type of so­cial change re­quired to sig­nif­i­cantly re­duce the neg­a­tive im­pact of human con­sump­tion on the planet? Pa­pers pre­sented will pre­sent ex­am­ples of pro­jects at var­i­ous scales that seek to ad­dress eco­log­i­cal is­sues, be­yond di­dac­tic ex­pres­sion, through the in­cor­po­ra­tion of tech­nol­ogy. This panel dis­cus­sion will ad­dress the con­tin­uum of pub­lic art, clean en­ergy prece­dents, and con­tem­po­rary tech­nolo­gies. Within this frame­work we will out­line and il­lus­trate the po­ten­tial that in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary teams and com­mu­ni­ties around the world have to ex­pand both the di­a­logue and ac­tual change. [READ MORE]

                7. Queer Viralities: Resistant Practices in New Media Art & Philosophy
              7. The in­ten­si­fi­ca­tion and pro­lif­er­a­tion of global con­nec­tiv­ity has opened dig­i­tal net­worked cul­ture to uni­ver­sal con­ta­gion. In­deed, it has been ar­gued we now live in a viral ecol­ogy under the sign of viral cap­i­tal­ism. As vi­ral­i­ties spread into var­i­ous realms of cul­ture, new media artists ex­plore the viral as that which has the abil­ity to con­trol and re­strict as well as dis­trib­ute and lib­er­ate. Our cur­rent viral ecol­ogy has opened up new tac­tics of re­sis­tance for var­i­ous artists, ac­tivists, and cul­tural pro­duc­ers. In this panel, we will focus on queer new media art and phi­los­o­phy that uses and in­ter­venes into the viral to form a rad­i­cal pol­i­tics of re­volt and utopia. The viral will be en­gaged with tech­ni­cally, philo­soph­i­cally, ar­tis­ti­cally, bi­o­log­i­cally, and af­fec­tively. Our aim is to show that while viral rhetoric and dis­courses have mar­gin­al­ized and con­trolled queer pop­u­la­tions, the viral re­mains an al­lu­sive, volatile po­ten­tial that can be ex­per­i­mented with to­ward cre­at­ing new queer pol­i­tics ... [READ MORE]

                8. Re-rooting Digital Culture: Media Art Ecologies
              8. Over the last decade the aware­ness of an­thro­pogenic cli­mate change has emerged in par­al­lel with hy­per-con­nec­tive dig­i­tal net­works. In the con­text of en­vi­ron­men­tal and eco­nomic col­lapse peo­ple around the world are seek­ing al­ter­na­tive vi­sions of pros­per­ity and sus­tain­able ways of liv­ing. While the legacy of the car­bon fu­eled In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion plays it­self out, we find our­selves grap­pling with ques­tions about the fu­ture im­pli­ca­tions of fast-evolv­ing global dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture. By their very na­ture the new tools, net­works and be­hav­iours of pro­duc­tiv­ity, ex­change and co­op­er­a­tion be­tween hu­mans and ma­chines grow and de­velop at an ac­cel­er­ated rate. The rhetoric, aes­thet­ics, tech­nics and as­so­ci­ated eth­i­cal ques­tions of dig­i­tal cul­ture are fun­da­men­tally chang­ing so­cial re­la­tions as well as the na­ture of our ma­te­r­ial ex­is­tence. The ideas for this in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary panel have grown out of Fur­ther­field’s Media Art Ecolo­gies pro­gramme and will ex­plore the re­la­tion­ship be­t... [READ MORE]

                9. Secure Insecurity
              9. The ob­ses­sion of se­cu­rity. What is the basis of se­cu­rity? Its ab­sence. Noth­ing needs to be se­cured, ex­cept the se­cu­rity it­self. Se­cu­rity is a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of state  and main cri­te­rion of po­lit­i­cal le­git­imiza­tion. Se­cu­rity vs. dis­ci­pline and law as in­stru­ments of gov­er­nance. On one side we have hard power struc­ture based on dis­ci­pline, dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and block­ade, iso­lat­ing power and clos­ing the ter­ri­to­ries and the sec­ond side: se­cu­rity pol­icy as­so­ci­ated with glob­al­iza­tion, in­ter­ven­ing and con­trol­ling processes as­so­ci­ated with lib­er­al­ism be­cause of se­cu­rity mea­sures may work in the con­text of move­ment of per­sons and goods. The di­vi­sion pro­posed by Fou­cault and Agam­ben on the hard law and the dy­namic ac­tiv­i­ties of the se­cu­rity pol­icy is an ar­ti­fi­cial as­sump­tion. These two areas are closely re­lated, com­ple­men­tary and pro­vide a medium for ex­am­ple laws can be quickly changed by power elite, or processes re­lated to the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of human life forc­ing chan... [READ MORE]

                10. SENSORIUM: Interdisciplinary Practices of Embodiment and Technology
              10. For this panel we pro­pose to dis­cuss a range of in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tices of em­bod­i­ment and tech­nol­ogy.  “Today [the body] and its vis­ceral sur­round­ings are stud­ded with ear­phones, zoom­ing in psy­chophar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, ex­tended with pros­the­ses, daz­zled by odor­less tastes and taste­less odors, trans­ported by new media, and buzzing with ideas”. _C. A. Jones, ed., Sen­so­rium: Em­bod­ied Ex­pe­ri­ence, Tech­nol­ogy, and Con­tem­po­rary Art (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Fol­low­ing Jones’s dis­cus­sion we will ex­plore the ways in which prac­ti­tion­ers and writ­ers ad­dress the phys­i­cal and af­fec­tive as­pects of our in­creas­ing en­gage­ment with tech­nol­ogy, whether through per­for­mance or through en­gage­ment with ro­bots and avatars. What types of sen­so­r­ial ex­pe­ri­ences and in­ti­ma­cies can be ex­plored in which vir­tual and phys­i­cal spaces are in­creas­ingly blurred? Can play, be a part in re­vi­tal­iz­ing our sen­so­r­ial sys­tem? Can these prac­tices offer a time and a space for re­flec­tion on em­bod­ied tech­no... [READ MORE]

                11. Serendipity is Dead…. Long Live Serendipity
              11. Many sci­en­tific and artis­tic in­no­va­tions have been at­trib­uted to serendip­ity, the fac­ulty of mak­ing and recog­nis­ing for­tu­nate and un­ex­pected dis­cov­er­ies by ac­ci­dent. The phe­nom­e­non is widely re­garded across dis­ci­plines as a valu­able way of spark­ing re­search ideas and trig­ger­ing new con­nec­tions. How­ever, while there is a wide­spread un­der­stand­ing that serendip­ity is a major con­trib­u­tor to in­no­va­tion, there is dis­agree­ment as to whether dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies pro­mote or sti­fle serendip­ity. The World­wide Web has al­lowed us to make many pos­i­tive changes in our so­ci­ety and en­vi­ron­ment, for ex­am­ple through so­cial net­work­ing and e-pub­lish­ing, but it also pre­sents prob­lems, by its very na­ture. Re­cently serendip­ity, and the role that the world­wide web and so­cial net­works now play in search query for in­for­ma­tion seek­ing, has re­ceived at­ten­tion from li­brary and in­for­ma­tion sci­ence, psy­chol­ogy, and com­puter sci­ence, art and de­sign. This re­newed in­ter­est and di­a­logue across art and sci­ence seeks... [READ MORE]

                12. Serious Animation: Beyond Art and Entertainment
              12. An­i­ma­tion meth­ods and tech­niques have evolved in re­cent years to be ac­cess­able to a wider range of cre­ative prac­ti­tion­ers than their orig­i­nal de­sign. Cre­ative prac­tice and re­search have taken meth­ods de­vel­oped for sto­ry­telling and en­ter­tain­ment and re­tasked them to solve real world prob­lems. An­i­ma­tion method­olo­gies are adapted to sup­port in­ves­ti­ga­tions into prod­uct vi­su­al­i­sa­tion, ar­chae­o­log­i­cal re­con­struc­tion, ar­chi­tec­tural vi­su­al­i­sa­tion, med­ical vi­su­al­i­sa­tion and many other spe­cialisms. Not re­stricted to vi­su­al­is­ing final de­sign so­lu­tions prior to pro­duc­tion, con­struc­tion and re­pro­duc­tion, but as an in­her­ent part of the de­sign and in­ves­ti­ga­tion process. This panel will ex­plore how a range of cre­ative prac­ti­tion­ers have adopted and adapted an­i­ma­tion to fur­ther their en­quiry. Using case stud­ies to ex­plore their aims and meth­ods, the pan­elists jour­neys will be de­scribed to il­lu­mi­nate their mo­ti­va­tions and in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary ap­proaches. Pre­sen­ters are ... [READ MORE]

                13. Share Workers: The Techniques and Meanings of Sustainable Digital Networking – Open Discussion
              13. The in­for­ma­tion shar­ing abil­i­ties of the in­ter­net has vastly ex­tended a pre-ex­ist­ing ca­pac­ity among artists to com­mu­ni­cate with each other about their work and lifestyles. With the ar­rival of so­cial media and the wave of in­ter­net use known as Web 2.0, the abil­ity to share has grown ex­po­nen­tially, be­com­ing a sub­ject in and of it­self, and gen­er­at­ing ex­perts in the tech­niques and mean­ings of shar­ing. And now, eco­nomic down-turn and dras­tic cuts to fund­ing, these free net­works have be­come in­valu­able for help­ing peo­ple sus­tain their prac­tice. This panel brings to­gether a set of ex­perts in the prac­ti­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal use of dig­i­tal net­works and in­fra­struc­tures for shar­ing. Work­ing across a range of areas from vi­sual art to music, per­for­mance and be­yond, they are united by their use of col­lab­o­ra­tive dig­i­tal tools and dri­ven by their propen­sity for pos­i­tive so­cial change. From con­sol­i­dat­ing con­nec­tions be­tween artists and arts pol­icy-mak­ers to rewiring our ed­u­ca­tional and eco­nomic cir­cuitry, this panel has co... [READ MORE]

                14. Short:Circuit: Cross Border Communications in New Media Between US and Turkey
              14. In keep­ing with the site of the ISEA2011 Sym­po­sium, this panel seeks to pre­sent pa­pers that ad­dress new media cross-bor­der dis­courses be­tween Turkey (the site of the sym­po­sium) and North Amer­ica (the birth­place of New Media). This panel seeks to in­ves­ti­gate North Amer­i­can/Turkey con­ver­sa­tions in New Media Art & Cul­ture; is­sues artists are ex­plor­ing, and res­i­dency and cu­ra­to­r­ial pro­jects. Also, we seek to probe the cross-cul­tural ef­fects of net­worked cul­ture and so­cial media upon the de­mo­graph­ics in­volved as well as the greater global mi­lieu. This will be done by ex­plor­ing artists, works, res­i­den­cies, ini­tia­tives work­ing be­tween these spaces and sites of on­line cul­ture that cre­ate frames of en­gage­ment for these is­sues. The ini­tial im­pe­tus of this panel comes from the chair’s in­volve­ment/re­search of Turk­ish artists who have lived in the States, North Amer­i­can artists work­ing in Turkey, and ways their ex­pe­ri­ences are re­flected in the work. In ad­di­tion, in con­ver­sa­tion with Burak Arikan, other is­sues such as the im­pact of Face... [READ MORE]

                15. Signs of Life: Human-Robot Intersubjectivities
              15. This panel in­ves­ti­gates the ‘signs of life’ that are ex­hib­ited by ro­bots in ex­hi­bi­tions and per­for­ma­tive en­vi­ron­ments and the ways that au­di­ences per­ceive and re­spond to life-like qual­i­ties in ro­botic char­ac­ters. As ro­bots and hu­mans come to­gether in gallery in­stal­la­tions and per­for­ma­tive en­vi­ron­ments, dif­fer­ent types of hu­man-ro­bot in­ter­sub­jec­tiv­i­ties come into play. Both hu­mans and ro­bots be­come ‘so­cial ac­tors’ ne­go­ti­at­ing re­la­tion­ships and modes of in­ter­ac­tion. How do au­di­ences per­ceive in­ten­tion­al­ity, per­son­al­ity and emo­tion in ro­bots? This panel ex­plores how the phys­i­cal qual­i­ties and af­for­dances of the robot (for ex­am­ple, its size, shape, form, mo­bil­ity and modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion) af­fect human in­ter­ac­tion and emo­tional in­vest­ment. How do ro­bots per­ceive and re­spond to their en­vi­ron­ments and to their human in­ter­ac­tors? Be­yond an­thro­po­mor­phism and bio-mime­sis, what other dis­tinc­tively ma­chinic ‘signs of life’ do ro­bots dis­play? [READ MORE]

                16. Site Specifics: Mobile Media Art and the Contexts of Place
              16. The pro­posed panel will iden­tify dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of loca­tive, site-spe­cific media art and ex­plore their im­pact on un­der­stand­ing the con­text of place and on our aware­ness of the en­vi­ron­ment. Mo­bile com­put­ing po­ten­tially en­ables var­i­ous forms of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion and has to be con­sid­ered in re­la­tion to con­cepts of em­bod­i­ment, the cre­ation of mean­ing, as well as in­di­vid­ual au­ton­omy and agency. The lat­ter as­pects of mo­bile com­put­ing and loca­tive media con­sid­er­ably af­fect our per­cep­tion and aware­ness of en­vi­ron­ments. Mo­bile de­vices can func­tion as tech­no­log­i­cal ex­ten­sions of em­bod­i­ment, con­nect­ing us to lo­ca­tion-based in­for­ma­tion and en­hanc­ing aware­ness of our en­vi­ron­ment or ‘so­cial body’. Loca­tive new media art, which uses lo­ca­tions in pub­lic space as a ‘can­vas’ for im­ple­ment­ing art pro­jects, has be­come one of the most ac­tive and fast-grow­ing areas within the larger field of dig­i­tal arts. Cam­era and video phones, smart phones, and mo­bile de­vices with em­bed­ded GPS ... [READ MORE]

                17. Slowness: Responding to Acceleration through Electronic Arts
              17. Im­mersed in a con­stant stream of in­for­ma­tion, los­ing our abil­ity to mean­ing­fully read any­thing longer than a page, and con­nected through a so­cial net­work that in users rep­re­sents the 3rd largest coun­try in the world, what hap­pens to how we make, view, and par­tic­i­pate in elec­tronic arts?  If our tools are also those which our ac­cel­er­at­ing our lives, how are we able to still make mean­ing­ful art?  Do artists dis­con­nect from the ex­pec­ta­tions of 24/7 and re­treat in their “stu­dios”? This panel fo­cuses on the topic of slow­ing down and elec­tronic arts.  Is slow­ness a use­ful con­cept for artists work­ing with tech­nol­ogy to con­sider?  Are elec­tronic artists using the same tools to com­ment on this ac­cel­er­a­tion?  Have we lost our abil­ity to slow down in the view­ing and ap­pre­ci­a­tion of art?  Fur­ther­more, do elec­tronic artists feel a re­spon­si­bil­ity to com­ment on and demon­strate al­ter­na­tive tech­nolo­gies that may pro­mote slow­ness and con­sid­ered thought? A panel of both artists and aca­d­e­mics will ad­dress these ques­tions, fo­cus­ing o... [READ MORE]

                18. Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 1
              18. We are liv­ing in a time of un­prece­dented sur­veil­lance, but un­like the omi­nous spec­tre of Or­well’s Big Brother, where power is clearly de­fined and al­ways pal­pa­ble, today’s meth­ods of in­for­ma­tion gath­er­ing are much more sub­tle and woven into the fab­ric of our every­day life. Through the use of seem­ingly in­nocu­ous al­go­rithms Ama­zon tells us which books we might like, Google tracks our queries to per­fect more ac­cu­rate re­sults, and Last.?fm con­nects us to peo­ple with sim­i­lar music tastes. Im­mersed in so­cial media, we com­mit to legally bind­ing con­tracts by agree­ing to ‘terms of use’. Hav­ing made the pact, we Twit­ter our sub­jec­tiv­i­ties in less than 140 char­ac­ters, con­tact our long lost friends on face­book and mo­bile-up­load our ge­o­t­agged videos on youtube. Where once sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies be­longed to gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies and the mil­i­tary do­main, the web has fos­tered a less op­ti­cally dri­ven and par­tic­i­pa­tory means of both mon­i­tor­ing and mon­e­tiz­ing our in­ti­mately lived ex­pe­ri­ences. Bring­ing to­gether art... [READ MORE]

                19. Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 2
              19. We are liv­ing in a time of un­prece­dented sur­veil­lance, but un­like the omi­nous spec­tre of Or­well’s Big Brother, where power is clearly de­fined and al­ways pal­pa­ble, today’s meth­ods of in­for­ma­tion gath­er­ing are much more sub­tle and woven into the fab­ric of our every­day life. Through the use of seem­ingly in­nocu­ous al­go­rithms Ama­zon tells us which books we might like, Google tracks our queries to per­fect more ac­cu­rate re­sults, and Last.?fm con­nects us to peo­ple with sim­i­lar music tastes. Im­mersed in so­cial media, we com­mit to legally bind­ing con­tracts by agree­ing to ‘terms of use’. Hav­ing made the pact, we Twit­ter our sub­jec­tiv­i­ties in less than 140 char­ac­ters, con­tact our long lost friends on face­book and mo­bile-up­load our ge­o­t­agged videos on youtube. Where once sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies be­longed to gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies and the mil­i­tary do­main, the web has fos­tered a less op­ti­cally dri­ven and par­tic­i­pa­tory means of both mon­i­tor­ing and mon­e­tiz­ing our in­ti­mately lived ex­pe­ri­ences. Bring­ing to­gether art... [READ MORE]

                20. Soundwwwalk Performance Panel
              20. Com­puter net­works and cities both are so­cial spaces that have emerged as ma­te­r­ial spaces where lives are lead and work gets done. They are su­per­struc­tures for com­mu­ni­ca­tion, net­works of chan­nels where in­for­ma­tion and goods are trans­ferred. Both spaces have their par­tic­u­lar acoustic prop­er­ties and qual­i­ties, and while ex­ten­sive stud­ies of en­vi­ron­men­tal acoustics and the sound­scape of our en­vi­ron­ment have been emerg­ing in the last 40 years, net­work spaces are still con­sid­ered to be spaces with­out sound,  acoustics or any sonic prop­er­ties. The panel on Sound­wwwalks will ex­plore this from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives: In­ves­ti­ga­tions to­wards an Acoustic Ecol­ogy of Net­works, and web browsers and media stored on the web as in­ter­face and ma­te­r­ial for live sound per­for­mance. The in­vited artists and re­searchers pre­pare lec­ture per­for­mances within the stan­dard pre­sen­ta­tion setup of the con­fer­ence. Per­for­mances by:
                1. Bern­hard Gar­nic­nig, ex­plor­ing the tran­si­tion of the built and “nat­ural” en­vi­ron­ment to t... [READ MORE]

                  2. Surveillant Spaces: From Autonomous Surveillance to Machine Voyeurism
                2. Our every­day en­vi­ron­ment has be­come a patch­work of sur­veil­lant spaces; in­ter­lac­ing our so­cial net­works and mo­bile de­vices with CCTV sys­tems, satel­lite and other wire­less sig­nals to pro­duce an end­lessly grow­ing net­work of ‘nodes’ with never-sleep­ing eyes. As ma­chine agency grows more com­plex we in­creas­ingly be­come ac­com­plices of the voyeuris­tic spec­ta­cle. While each sur­veil­lant space may have dif­fer­ent mo­tives and tar­gets, all of them serve as more or less au­tonomous pros­the­ses that ex­tend, en­hance or pro­lif­er­ate the human eye. But what hap­pens if we push the ques­tion of own­er­ship of the gaze to a point where the ma­chine’s agency of see­ing not only aug­ments the human eye but be­comes in­de­pen­dent, gen­er­a­tive and ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing its own nar­ra­tives?  This panel ex­plores sur­veil­lant spaces from the point of view of the ma­chine. What does it see? Why does it look? And how does it re­spond? It will both crit­i­cally and play­fully in­ves­ti­gate the per­for­ma­tive po­ten­tial of the ma­chinic gaze and the agen­cies and ma... [READ MORE]

                  3. Test_Lab: Summer Sessions 2011
                3. Every year, V2_ In­sti­tute for the Un­sta­ble Media in­vites a small group of up-and-com­ing artists to spend their sum­mer in the V2_Lab for an in­tense short-term res­i­dency. Dur­ing these so-called Sum­mer Ses­sions, the se­lected artists are given the op­por­tu­nity to de­velop an art­work in close col­lab­o­ra­tion with V2_’s ex­pert de­vel­op­ers, cu­ra­tor and pro­ject man­agers.  This year’s Sum­mer Ses­sions will wel­come an­other se­lec­tion of up-and-com­ing artists into the V2_Lab to work on pro­jects in the fields of aug­mented re­al­ity, wear­able tech­nol­ogy, and ecol­ogy – the three cen­tral re­search themes of the V2_Lab. By hold­ing these Sum­mer Ses­sions res­i­den­cies in par­al­lel, V2_ aims to pro­mote a cre­ative syn­ergy be­tween these up-and-com­ing artists. In this spe­cial edi­tion of V2_’s Test_Lab pro­gram at ISEA2011, the out­come of the Sum­mer Ses­sions 2011 will be pre­sented. As it is cus­tom to V2_’s Test_Lab, the pro­jects will be demon­strated live and the au­di­ence will be in­vited to as­sess the art­works hands-on. [READ MORE]

                  4. Testing New Ground: An Interdisciplinary Discussion on Hybrid Habitats
                4. The media en­vi­ron­ments we now in­habit are hy­brids: both ma­te­r­ial/vir­tual, ac­tual/imag­i­nary, sci­en­tific and sci­ence-fic­tional, fu­tur­is­tic and yet also fun­da­men­tally grounded in media his­to­ries. This panel will con­sider the is­sues at stake as we shift from think­ing of the screen as a por­tal to other worlds that mir­ror those we cor­po­re­ally in­habit to fig­ur­ing out al­ter­na­tive ways of think­ing about tech­no­log­i­cally me­di­ated forms of in­hab­i­ta­tion. It aims to con­tribute to new ways of think­ing about habi­tats by in­volv­ing artists work­ing with mixed re­al­ity tech­nolo­gies and think­ing through the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of their re­search for is­sues of self and em­bod­i­ment. The is­sues of self and cor­po­re­al­ity that emerge from sites that are ‘vir­tu­ally’ in­hab­ited are con­sid­ered along­side other habi­tats where screen tech­nolo­gies are in­ter­wo­ven with ma­te­r­ial ge­o­gra­phies. The­o­rist-his­to­ri­ans who have re­searched con­tem­po­rary urban en­vi­ron­ments and off-world habi­tats such as space sta­tions offer ... [READ MORE]

                  5. The Art of Software Cities
                5. The pur­pose of the panel is to in­ves­ti­gate the aes­thetic and cul­tural im­pli­ca­tions of a sit­u­a­tion where new in­ter­faces ap­pear in pub­lic urban space (net­worked, mo­bile, ubiq­ui­tous, etc.). The urban media the­o­rist Scott Mc­Quire ar­gues that with this de­vel­op­ment, ‘the media event’ is in the process of re­turn­ing to the pub­lic urban do­main. The main ques­tion is in what way? Does dig­i­tal media merely pro­vide new forms and new pub­lic spec­ta­cles in the city, or does it also prop­a­gate pub­lic ac­tiv­ity? If so, what kinds of ac­tiv­ity?  In the panel we pro­pose to see this de­vel­op­ment of pub­lic in­ter­faces as an in­tro­duc­tion of not just media but also soft­ware into the city. Today’s media cities are soft­ware cities. A dis­tinct char­ac­ter­is­tic is that the rep­re­sen­ta­tions of media do not just imply new aes­thetic forms and rep­re­sen­ta­tions but are al­ways con­nected to un­der­ly­ing com­pu­ta­tional processes that change the com­plex life forms of the city. With a focus on new forms of cre­ative pro­duc­tion pan­elists will pre­sent their ta... [READ MORE]

                  6. The Big Bang of Electronic Art: Merging Abstraction and Representation in the Age of Digital Imaging
                6. One of the most pro­found trans­for­ma­tions of the elec­tronic age is the chang­ing re­la­tion­ship of rep­re­sen­ta­tional im­agery and ab­strac­tion. Once in­ex­orably bound to paint­ing, the ad­vent of pho­tog­ra­phy made it the medium of choice for doc­u­men­ta­tion, a split which in turn freed paint­ing to pri­or­i­tize for­mal el­e­ments over rep­re­sen­ta­tional con­tent, cre­at­ing a vo­cab­u­lary of mean­ing de­rived from color, form, tex­ture, and ges­ture, and set­ting artists down a path that even­tu­ally cul­mi­nated in Ab­stract Ex­pres­sion­ism.  When dig­i­tal imag­ing de­vel­oped, early com­mer­cial de­vel­op­ers of soft­ware en­vi­sioned that this split would con­tinue, but this was hardly the case for the early soft­ware artists, work­ing in the days be­fore easy scan­ning and dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy.  As they “painted” into the com­puter, they found the same unique qual­i­ties of rep­e­ti­tion and it­er­a­tive trans­for­ma­tions that their pro­gram­ming col­leagues found just a few years ear­lier, as well as the abil­ity to add ges­tural ex­pres­sion.  Ov... [READ MORE]

                  7. The Institute of Unnecessary Research
                7. Ein­stein said:  “If we knew what it was we were doing it would be called re­search, would it?” This panel out­lines “The In­sti­tute of Un­nec­es­sary Re­search” and pre­sents a new par­a­digm in the way artists are en­gag­ing with the world through trans­dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tices. It brings to­gether art, sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy by cre­at­ing par­tic­i­pa­tory au­di­ence ex­pe­ri­ences, per­for­mances and in­stal­la­tions. Some­times hu­mor­ous and some­times grotesque, our work pushes bound­aries and crit­i­cally ques­tions the means of knowl­edge pro­duc­tion in the 21st Cen­tury. Artists are in­no­va­tors, if a new piece of tech­nol­ogy or a new medium, be­comes avail­able; artists want to try it, to ex­per­i­ment with it- from mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy to ro­bot­ics; from tis­sue cul­ture to neu­ro­science. Some artists take on the role of a sci­en­tist in al­most a per­for­ma­tive way and some sci­en­tists be­come artists them­selves. Phi­los­o­phy and ethics is al­ways at its core and the work un­packs the in­stru­men­tal­iza­tion of sci­ence and art for com­mer­ci... [READ MORE]

                  8. The Madness of Methods: Emerging Arts Research Practices
                8. Com­mon among the cre­ative fields–the arts, sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy and de­sign–is a com­mit­ment to the pro­duc­tion of new knowl­edge based on orig­i­nal re­search.  Re­search is the praxis of sys­tem­atic crit­i­cal re­flec­tion that fo­cuses on com­pelling do­main-de­fined ques­tions.  The “ques­tion of method” is often used to dis­tin­guish art and de­sign from sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy: where the lat­ter are de­fined by rei­fied method­olog­i­cal par­a­digms, and the for­mer by the re­pu­di­a­tion of such par­a­digms.  In prac­tice we know this to be a false op­po­si­tion: artists and de­sign­ers sys­tem­at­i­cally en­gage the em­pir­i­cal in many ways in their cre­ative work; sci­en­tists and tech­nol­o­gists cre­atively im­pro­vise to form ra­tio­nal ac­counts of their tech­ni­cal pro­jects. The par­tic­i­pants on this panel are each en­gaged in de­vel­op­ing in­no­v­a­tive meth­ods that demon­strates the no­tion of art prac­tice as trans­for­ma­tive re­search.  For some of them this takes the form of per­for­mance and real-time video mix­ing, for oth­ers it is th... [READ MORE]

                  9. The Matter with Media
                9. Along with in­vited pan­elists, the se­lected par­tic­i­pants will be wel­comed to dis­cuss their ideas, art­works, media and other forms of prac­tice-in­fused re­search in re­sponse to the fol­low­ing ideas: “The early human artists who tapped into this ex­pres­sive reser­voir for their cave paint­ings, body tat­toos, and rit­ual cer­e­monies, far from in­tro­duc­ing artistry into the world were sim­ply adding one more voice to an on­go­ing ma­te­r­ial cho­rus.” _Manuel De­Landa Our dig­i­tal, net­worked age hides from us in plain sight the con­crete, his­tor­i­cal and af­fec­tive cor­re­spon­dences be­tween mat­ter, in­for­ma­tion and per­cep­tion. The prac­tice and cul­ture of art-and-tech­nol­ogy make it easy to for­get the ma­te­r­ial un­der­pin­nings and im­pli­ca­tions of artis­tic ac­tiv­ity and pro­duc­tion. In­for­ma­tion sys­tems, media and the elec­tronic arts in par­tic­u­lar re­quire the sup­port of a be­wil­der­ing nexus of power and in­fra­struc­ture. This fact “alerts us to the at­ten­u­ated in­dex­i­cal trace of an ob­jec­tive real that haunts the ... [READ MORE]

                  10. The Media Space: Evolving Media Architecture and Its Legend
                10. Through­out human his­tory, ar­chi­tec­ture played a key role in terms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the pub­lic do­main. In ad­di­tion to the es­tab­lished in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized ar­chi­tec­tural com­mu­ni­ca­tion (gov­ern­men­tal build­ings, palaces, banks, schools, etc.), a new field of adap­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion based on pres­ence, in­tent and own­er­ship is emerg­ing. Dis­cov­er­ies in the field of media tech­nol­ogy con­sti­tute the dri­ving force in this evo­lu­tion­ary progress. Media, by all means, is ex­tend­ing its ac­tive fields and is cre­at­ing a con­ver­gence be­tween psy­chi­cal and vir­tual spaces. Cities are in a rapid evo­lu­tion age: façades are chang­ing, ar­chi­tec­ture is de­vel­op­ing more into the dig­i­tal do­main and so­cial in­ter­ac­tion of in­hab­i­tants is be­com­ing much more me­di­ated. How are all of these changes af­fect­ing our daily life? It is seen that media ar­chi­tec­ture has al­ready be­come a key re­search topic at the in­ter­sec­tion of many dif­fer­ent fields such as ur­ban­ism, ar­chi­tec­ture, ma­te­r­ial sci­ences and so­ci­ol­og... [READ MORE]

                  11. The Volatility and Stability of WorldMaking as Techné
                11. The term techné is an an­cient philo­soph­i­cal con­cept that was de­bated by philoso­phers such as Xenophon and Plato, as well as more con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers such as Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger and Félix Guat­tari. In sim­pli­fied terms techné con­cerns the art and craft of mak­ing. In par­tic­u­lar the dis­cus­sion of techné is not only con­cerned with what is made, but how and why it is made. The think­ing of art prac­tices (music, art, and ar­chi­tec­ture) as a kind of World­Mak­ing refers to a techné that is seek­ing to ex­plore art-con­cepts as ex­pres­sive al­ter­na­tive re­al­i­ties through the de­vel­op­ment of self-re­flex­ive and in­ter­nally con­sis­tent art-worlds. The Volatil­ity and Sta­bil­ity of World­Mak­ing as Techné panel dis­cus­sion will focus on the in­volve­ment of the tech­nol­ogy of World­Mak­ing in par­tic­i­pa­tory art prac­tice. Such prac­tice can be found in all areas of art, how­ever, the ones under scrutiny for this par­tic­u­lar panel are: in­ter­ac­tive, gen­er­a­tive, pros­thetic art, ar­chi­tec­ture and music prac­tices that de­pend on the par­tic­i­pa... [READ MORE]

                  12. Think BETA: Participative Evolution of Smart Cities
                12. All think­ing is in BETA – so how should the fu­ture city and ur­ban­ity be de­signed? The panel dis­cusses new processes for the Par­tic­i­pa­tive Evo­lu­tion of Smart Cities, the cul­ture and tech­nol­ogy of the new soft city. The aim is to com­bine ad­vanced new media art with re­search and de­vel­op­ment of in­no­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies, par­tic­i­pa­tion method­olo­gies and in­no­v­a­tive ser­vices for the de­sign of the new ur­ban­ity. The art ob­jec­tive is to arise new media and urban art sce­nar­ios in areas of re-de­sign and re-con­struc­tion. The tech­ni­cal ob­jec­tive is, to re­search and to de­velop mo­bile-sta­tion­ary en­vi­ron­ment for smart cities as par­tic­i­pa­tory and per­for­ma­tive cul­tural media in­fra­struc­ture for their de­vel­op­ment. It is about the re­quire­ments for fu­ture tech­ni­cal and cul­tural mass player in­fra­struc­ture for the urban de­vel­op­ment of Smart Cities and the op­ti­miza­tion of mu­nic­i­pal ser­vices and dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­tures in form of media art and gam­ing processes. Which tech­ni­cal ap­proaches from media art, urba... [READ MORE]

                  13. Through the Roadblocks: Technology and Orality
                13. This panel will dis­cuss how oral­ity and tech­nol­ogy in the arts, through so­cial nar­ra­tives and urban de­ter­mi­nants, trans­mute re­sult­ing in lo­calised adopted new forms.  The pro­found changes that have in­flu­enced artis­tic cre­ative processes by dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy are lead­ing to a re­de­f­i­n­i­tion of both the role of the artist and the re­la­tion­ship be­tween artist and au­di­ence. It has been thor­oughly dis­cussed that dig­i­tal media art forms have a ten­dency to aban­don the clear-cut di­vi­sion be­tween in­di­vid­ual cre­ator and au­di­ence and move to­wards col­lec­tive sit­u­a­tions where au­thor­ship is shared be­tween many. (Alexan­der 2007, Austin 2007, Bakioglu 2007, Pet­titt 2007). This panel dis­cusses how elec­tronic arts and tech­nol­ogy re­late to col­lec­tive and non-writ­ten as­pects of cul­ture. It ex­am­ines both spon­ta­neous processes sup­ported by the na­ture of dig­i­tal media and con­scious strate­gies that build on per­cep­tion and oral­ity in glo­cal cul­ture. The panel will pre­sent and dis­cuss is­sues re­lated to this topic cen­tral to thei... [READ MORE]

                  14. Transmedia Narrative: Modes of Digital Scholarship and Design Across Public Space

                  Travels Through Hyper-Liminality: Exploring the space where digital meets the real
                14. On the thresh­old of cross­ing over being nei­ther real nor vir­tual, an os­cil­la­tion be­tween two states of ex­is­tence, on­line-of­fline, awake but dream­ing in a sub-con­scious­ness state, the bub­ble be­tween start­ing and ar­riv­ing, the in-be­tween, a dis­ap­pear­ance, the third space … Con­sid­er­ing the di­verse de­ter­mi­na­tions as to what the lim­i­nal means in our dig­i­tally dri­ven cul­ture this panel asks ‘To what ex­tent are artists dig­i­tally fa­cil­i­tat­ing con­vivial spaces where par­tic­i­pants can en­gagewith and co-cre­ate an art work?’. Six dif­fer­ent ap­proaches are dis­played within the panel ex­per­tise to in­ter­ro­gate dig­i­tally fa­cil­i­tated lim­i­nal­ity as ei­ther a trans­for­ma­tive space of cre­ative tran­scen­dence, or a con­vivial and so­cial space where art can hap­pen. Dig­i­tal media and new tech­nol­ogy is re­con­fig­ur­ing our re­la­tion­ship with the world and is also af­fect­ing how artists re­late with their pub­lic. Now tech­nolo­gies can help to po­si­tion art into the every­day of peo­ple’s lives and ac­tiv­i­ties, out­... [READ MORE]

                  15. Tyrannies of Participation
                15. Work­ing across the arts, music, and pol­i­tics, this panel con­sid­ers the dy­nam­ics of power in me­di­ated par­tic­i­pa­tion. Bor­row­ing its title from the work of Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, who ques­tioned the le­git­i­macy of par­tic­i­pa­tory de­vel­op­ment pro­jects led by the World Bank and other in­ter-gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies, this panel ad­dresses the un­in­tended con­se­quences of, and the power strug­gles in, col­lab­o­ra­tive music plat­forms, so­cial net­works, wire­less in­fra­struc­tures and open gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives. The pur­pose is to ex­plore the con­struc­tion and val­u­a­tion of par­tic­i­pa­tory dis­courses, de­signs, or ex­pe­ri­ences and chal­lenge re­ceived wis­dom of par­tic­i­pa­tion’s power. When does the dis­course of par­tic­i­pa­tion mask power? Who has ac­tual ver­sus per­ceived au­thor­ity? How do bot­tom-up, col­lab­o­ra­tive-based, lev­eled so­cial, cul­tural, and po­lit­i­cal ex­per­i­ments cre­ate new in­equal­i­ties? [READ MORE]

                  16. Unsitely Aesthetics: the Reconfiguring of Public Space in Electronic Art
                16. With the growth of the in­ter­net and mo­bile tele­phony across the globe we are wit­ness­ing new con­fig­u­ra­tions of pub­lic space and pub­lic cul­ture. In his con­clu­sion to the book Net­worked Publics, Kazys Var­nelis de­scribes this new state of af­fairs as net­work cul­ture and pro­poses that net­work cul­ture has re­placed the log­ics of both mod­ernism and post­mod­ernism, be­com­ing the dom­i­nant cul­tural logic of our age. As the con­di­tions of net­work cul­ture ex­pand many artists are forg­ing a new re­la­tion­ship with the in­ter­net, not as a medium, but rather as an­other site of their work. Today it is not the vir­tual as a sep­a­rate space apart that is of in­ter­est, but the fact that the lay­er­ing of the vir­tual sits be­side every­day life through con­nec­tion. For many artists the in­ter­net is now act­ing as one site of the work as well as an­other form of pub­lic space. These artists are leav­ing the stu­dio be­hind, mov­ing and work­ing in pub­lic spaces, in a process that is both mo­bile and no­madic. Un­sitely Aes­thet­ics refers to a par­tic­u­lar aes­thet­ics that has eme... [READ MORE]

                  17. Variable Reality – Inter-formalities in Digital/Analogue Arts
                17. This panel will ex­plore the no­tion that con­tem­po­rary cre­ative prac­tice is in­creas­ingly tak­ing place in and be­tween ana­logue and dig­i­tal cul­tures. And that by en­fold­ing the cre­ative processes in­her­ent within these two en­vi­ron­ments we can gen­er­ate richly in­formed cre­ative out­comes that build on the qual­i­ties of both dig­i­tal and ma­te­r­ial cul­ture. This work­ing in and be­tween dig­i­tal and ana­logue en­vi­ron­ments, to­ward the gen­er­a­tion of cre­ative works is the essence of what the panel will dis­cuss as cross or vari­able re­al­ity cre­ative prac­tices. The panel will con­sider the po­ten­tial for mak­ing within and across dig­i­tal/ma­te­r­ial en­vi­ron­ments through the pre­sen­ta­tion of their own re­search/prac­tice. [READ MORE]

                  18. VIDA: New Discourses, Tropes and Modes in Art and Artificial Life Research
                18. For this panel, we will an­a­lyze new dis­courses and modes in art and ar­ti­fi­cial life re­search. This will be placed in re­la­tion to re­cent out­comes of the com­pu­ta­tional sci­ences to­gether with the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary de­vel­op­ments and dis­courses of the life sci­ences. The focus will be specif­i­cally on: cre­ative modes en­gaged with dy­namic liv­ing processes that have been af­fected by sim­u­la­tion, ex­plo­rations in syn­thetic life sys­tems, en­vi­ron­men­tal vi­su­al­iza­tions, hy­brid spaces, aug­mented and mixed re­al­ity land­scapes and prospec­tive meth­ods and de­vices. [READ MORE]

                  19. Virtual Doppelgangers: Embodiment, Morphogenesis, and Transversal Action
                19. In 1969 Gilles Deleuze the­o­rized the “BwO” or Body With­out Or­gans (in The Logic of the Sense, after Ar­taud’s orig­i­nal term). It refers to the vir­tual di­men­sion of the body and its po­ten­tials, likened to the egg as site of em­bod­i­ment (in Deleuze and Guat­tari’s Anti-Oedi­pus)—a set of mul­ti­ple po­ten­tial­i­ties as well as dys­func­tional rep­e­ti­tions. In this panel we seek to ex­plore the re­la­tions be­tween fleshly bod­ies and dig­i­tized ones as sites of em­bod­i­ment for our cur­rent, in­for­mat­i­cally en­er­gized ex­is­tences. From Face­book re­la­tion­ships to per­for­mances in Sec­ond Life, many of us ex­pe­ri­ence var­i­ous parts of our lives vir­tu­ally today. But how are these ex­pe­ri­ences ab­sorbed into our so-called “real lives”?  In what ways do our vir­tual and phys­i­cal spaces in­ter­sect—are they ag­glom­er­ated re­al­i­ties (Har­away), or em­bed­ded in some on­to­log­i­cal con­tin­uum? There have been con­tro­ver­sies and sup­port­ing stud­ies (esp. con­cern­ing vir­tual games) sug­gest­ing that ex­cess so­cial me­di­a­tion is... [READ MORE]

                  20. Visual Effects Remixed
                20. Vi­sual ef­fects (VFX) are the var­i­ous com­puter gen­er­ated processes by which im­agery is cre­ated and or ma­nip­u­lated out­side the con­text of a live ac­tion film shoot. Tra­di­tion­ally mov­ing image vi­sual medi­ums in a per­for­ma­tive / gallery con­text have been pri­mar­ily ex­pe­ri­enced as “play­back” medi­ums, in which ma­te­r­ial is fixed in time and is played from be­gin­ning to end. Real-time vi­su­als on the other hand re­quire the in­ter­ven­tion of a per­former or a user. In the case of the VJ or live film­maker, he or she chooses the video clips in real-time, se­lects the op­tions for ef­fects and de­ter­mines the com­posit­ing of im­ages and ef­fects. Re­cently a num­ber of (tra­di­tional) Nar­ra­tive film mak­ers have moved away from struc­tural nar­ra­tive and into the realm of ‘live cin­ema’, remix­ing their films for au­di­ences as a per­for­ma­tive ex­pe­ri­ence. This raises in­ter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties to ex­tend the genre with a per­for­ma­tive art based ap­proach. British di­rec­tors Peter Green­away and Mike Fig­gis in­creas­ingly work with this me... [READ MORE]

                  21. Voicing Electronic Arts
                21. There is an un­canny qual­ity to voice in elec­tronic arts, vis­cer­ally car­ry­ing bod­ily in­ti­ma­cies to the lis­tener through phys­i­cal spaces, yet dis­lo­cated from the speaker’s body through re­pro­duc­tion and trans­mis­sion. The dig­i­tal voice is para­dox­i­cally human and ma­chinic – in­ti­mate and in­tense,  as it con­nects sub­jec­tiv­i­ties on the one hand and the dig­i­tally ab­stract on the other hand,  as it passes through ma­chines on to the other. Whether voices call to us across the in­ter­net, or across the smaller space of an in­stal­la­tion, or from the small screen of ma­chin­ima, media artists have found this para­dox­i­cal and un­canny qual­ity al­lur­ing and have worked with it across a range of media and emo­tional ranges. While voice is often dis­cussed in a po­lit­i­cal and metaphor­i­cal sense (giv­ing peo­ple a voice through media) the aim of this panel is to ad­dress the aes­thet­ics of voice in media art. Voice, with all its para­doxes and am­bi­gu­i­ties, is over-ripe for the the­o­ret­i­cal and art­tis­tic en­gage­ment that Roland Barthes in­vited with his now v... [READ MORE]

                  22. Without Sin: Taboo and Freedom within Digital Media
                22. Framed by a con­text of in­creas­ing media anx­i­ety over the vol­ume of usage and the na­ture of so­cial net­work­ing web­sites (Green­field 2009), this panel will broadly ex­plore the roots of this fear and the role of dig­i­tal media and so­cial de­vel­op­ment, specif­i­cally in­ter­ro­gat­ing prac­tices of so­cial iden­tity and con­tem­po­rary ex­pe­ri­ences of re­al­ity/fic­tion. Fol­low­ing as­so­ci­ated fears there has been an in­creased pres­sure from the Amer­i­can Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion (AMA) for the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric As­so­ci­a­tion (APA) to in­clude video game ad­dic­tion as a sub-type of in­ter­net ad­dic­tion, along with sex­ual pre­oc­cu­pa­tions and e-mail/text mes­sag­ing in the up­com­ing 2012 Di­ag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual of Men­tal Dis­or­ders (DSM-V), the stan­dard di­ag­nos­tic text used by psy­chi­a­trists world­wide. The re­al­ity of an un-chartable (dark) In­ter­net, the ac­knowl­edged rate of change and the sig­nif­i­cantly prob­lem­atic lack of any so­ci­etal sanc­tion or pro­hi­bi­tion (when surf­ing the In­ter­net) gives ... [READ MORE]

                  23. Zones of Contact and Fields of Consistency in Electronic Literature
                23. This panel will ex­plore the re­la­tion­ship be­tween crit­i­cism and cre­ative prac­tice in elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture.  This dis­cus­sion will dis­cuss the po­ten­tials of and lim­its to lit­er­ary crit­i­cism in the realm of dig­i­tal po­et­ics and nar­ra­tive.  Heck­man’s paper dis­cusses the re­la­tion­ship be­tween speed, lit­er­ary crit­i­cism and folk­son­omy.  Ret­tberg will high­light the ELM­CIP Knowl­edge­base and com­mu­nity-based re­search prac­tices in the field of elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture.  Gri­gar will ad­dress the nar­ra­tive in the age of dig­i­tal media.  And Gibbs and Angel will ex­plore hand­writ­ing as an em­bod­ied praxis link­ing thought with cor­po­re­al­ity through the medium of ges­ture, and its trans­for­ma­tions in text-based new media art. Pan­elists will ad­dress the crit­i­cal value of es­tab­lish­ing con­nec­tions with tra­di­tional lit­er­ary vo­cab­u­lary, both as a method for un­der­stand­ing new media art within lit­er­ary con­texts and as a method of ad­vanc­ing the de­vel­op­ment of new crit­i­cal tools, par­tic­u­larly those that ... [READ MORE]

    Institutional Presentations:

    • East & West
    • Let’s start from the title of the panel. In Eu­rope the other/cul­tures were tra­di­tion­ally de­fined as east­ern, Ori­en­tal, far out, a way of defin­ing that es­tab­lishes our bor­der­lines and pre­sent in dif­fer­ent ways in all cul­tures, since all cul­tures start from them­selves. So it’s im­por­tant to change the “Ge­o­graphic” de­f­i­n­i­tion that un­der­lines  dis­tance and re-place it with a mov­ing mind ge­og­ra­phy rhi­zome/like & multi/cen­tres, be­yond any post/colo­nial­ist and any self cen­tered cul­tures. The great de­vel­ope­ment of dig­i­tal media in the east and more gen­er­ally in the non/west­ern cul­tures chal­lenges the early asset of the dig­i­tal cul­tures. Not only Sil­i­con Val­ley, Japan and Eu­rope ( the source de­vel­op­ers of the 80’s), but many other cul­tures with a cross over of points of view ( and new uses of dig­i­tal cul­tures) that change the old dig­i­tal ge­og­ra­phy. The panel will try to make a point about what’s hap­pen­ing today, and what’s the “state of the art” of re­la­tion­ships and ex­changes be­tween East & West, and what are ... [READ MORE]

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