Steve Anderson

digital, avant-garde, design, music video, commercial art, new media, convergence

This paper maps two divergent trajectories within a narrowly defined sphere of short-form, time-based, digital media - specifically music videos, design-oriented short films and motion graphics - of the past ten years. I am particularly interested in considering this work's potential for understanding emergent relations to the perception and construction of space, time and bodies; the status of narrative; relations between technology and material culture; and shifting conceptions of the roles played by producers and consumers.

Tapio Mäkelä

public space, mobile, city, interactive, art of memory, interface, city, critical practice, tactics, participatory, engaging

Location based media and in particular the so called locative arts discourse make claims for reconfiguring public spaces through participatory uses of mobile and wireless technologies in urban settings. In this paper I am questioning the degree to which location based media can challenge existing configurations of public space. Instead I suggest to "read" these acts, on the one hand as metaphoric or conceptual acts which address the discourse of public space, and on the other hand as private yet shared practices within public spaces, new forms of ars memorativa. In the paper I also consider the role of new technologies as a sublime.

Jon Ippolito, Joline Blais

art, immunology, research, genre, perversity, arrest, revelation, executability, recognition, perseverance

Art's recent infiltration of stock markets, courtrooms, and mobile phones marks a seismic shift in the role it plays in society. The once-academic question "what is art" has acquired new urgency now that society depends on this collective immune system to confront technology's increasing encroachment into daily life. Drawing on case studies from our 2006 book At the Edge of Art, this paper examines the special powers granted art of the Internet age, which--no longer content to sit on a pedestal or auction block--can respond aggressively to the ethical crises caused by technology's infection of society.

Chinese new media art, digitality, Archive Rose Goldsen, Archive of New Media Art Cornell University

Cornell University's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and its specialized collection, The Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant Garde Art, include an extensive array of new media art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. As the Founding Curator, I have been struck by how these collections and the socio-cultural conditions of their production have expanded my sense of the mission of the Goldsen Archive as well as the cultural conditions and promises of digitality itself.

Valentina Nisi, Dr. Ian Oakley, Dr. Mads Haahr

absence, community networks, memorials, communication, space, place

This paper describes the content capture, design and implementation of the Media Portrait of the Liberties project. It focuses primarily on the results of a subjective user study conducted to gauge reactions to this novel media format. We close this paper by discussing the results of this study, and speculating on future directions for this work 

Machiko Kusahara

media art, technology, science, material, gadget, entertainment, toy, commercialism, product, movement, history, culture

In the international community of media art, Japanese media artists are often criticized for having positive attitude to technology rather than being critical. It is true that playfulness is often appreciated in Japanese media art, and there is no clear border between art and entertainment, or with popular culture. Why is that so? Is it wrong to appreciate technology? The paper discusses cultural and historical background of Japanese media art that leads to a proposal of Device Art, a new concept in media art. 

World-Expo City

Shanghai is in the process of becoming the Asian New York, at the heart of the continent. It is this urbanisation process, emerging in a city with no end and no limits, that is being discussed for 2010. Consequently, what is being prepared at Shanghai is not simply an immaterial bridge between a universal-type event and a planetary dimension. Similarly, the theme of the contemporary city is coming increasingly to the fore in exhibitions dedicated to the electronic arts, as at the forthcoming international ISEA gathering, to be held at San Jose in 2006. Some of these planned interactions between urban evolution and current techno-scientific developments constitute the linkage between today's artistic mutations.

Joline Blais

indigenous, commons, internet, property, belonging, colonize, stories, networks, webs of trust, cyberspace

Indigenous Domain discusses the limitations of current colonial paradigms for cyberspace that try to rope off "commons" or "reservations" for the public good, but which still operate within a larger colonial framework. The paper proposes alternatives to the prevailing colonial paradigm of the "commons" and "copyleft" based on models drawn from indigenous culture, permaculture and digital culture. 

Ned Rossiter

organised networks, distributive education, new institutional forms, collaborative transdisciplinary practices

This paper describes and analyses the emergence of "organised networks" as new institutional forms. Organised networks, in contrast to "networked organisations" (universities, corporations, government, even contemporary art institutions), are distinct for the ways in which the organisation of social relations is immanent to the media of communication. The paper considers some of the ways in which organised networks facilitate the communication and production of educational resources across peer-to-peer, transdisciplinary social-technical networks.

Trebor Scholz

self-organized cultural projects, online collaboration, free cooperation, social software, mutual aid

Current debates focus too much on what social tools can do and not enough on the people who use them. Motivations of the multitudes who add content to online environments matter a great deal. What follows here are hands-on guidelines and an outline of preconditions for online participation. Terms like: involvement, turn taking, network, feedback, or distributed creativity1 are frequently applied to characterise this kind of social and cultural interaction.

Gheorghe Dan, Alisa Andrasek

intuitive programming, biomimetics, cultural mimetics, cyberbotany, hybrid reality, heterotopia, morphogenetic architecture, evolutionary fashion, design, phylotic multiverse continuum

Phylotic is a computational system employing dynamically relational assemblages for analysis, synthesis and cataloguing of cultural and biological phenotypes into a library of seeds or DNA, which may be hybridized and grown upon infinite topographies

In Phylotic, the human body becomes the most intimate heterotopic space, the breathing landscape onto which the computational system grows elaborate and sensuous bodyscapes/gardens

Sharon Daniel

community, public domain, citizenship, information society, social justice, digital inclusion

Secrets are the opposite of information. There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are "public secrets" - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself - like, "don't ask, don't tell." Such shared secrets sustain social and political institutions. The injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are "public secrets". This paper will discuss the phenomenon of the "public secret" in the context information culture and present strategies for using information technologies to unmask such secrets. The presentation will reference an online audio database of statements by incarcerated women and injection drug users, which reveal the secret injustices of the war on drugs, the Criminal Justice System and the Prison Industrial Complex.

Alison Sant

mapping, basemap, collaborative mapping, locative media

Current collaborative mapping projects, using locative media technologies, have often overlooked the conventions of the basemap as a site for reinvention. Although these projects imagine alternative organizations of urban space through the way it is digitally mapped, they remain bounded by datasets that reinforce a Cartesian and static notion of urban space. This paper questions the methodology of the basemap, as it is utilized in these projects, and proposes alternative tactics for mapping the city.

Mirjam Struppek

interactivity, digital displays, urban screens, public sphere, urban space, interactive facades, local culture, social sustainability, neighbourhood reactivation, urban communication

www.urbanscreens.org investigates how the currently dominating commercial use of outdoor screens can be broadened with cultural content contributing to a lively urban society. Interactivity and participation will bind the screens more to the communal context of the space and therefore create local identity and engagement. The integration of current information technologies support the development of a new digital layer of the city in a merge of material and immaterial space redefining the function of this growing infrastructure.

Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr

art and science, art and biology, new species, extended body, semi-living, partial life, tissue culture, tissue engineering

The biomass of disassociated living cells and tissues is in the thousands of tons. These fragments do not fall under current biological or cultural classifications. The notion of the extended body can be seen as a way to define this category of life, while at the same time attempting to destabilise some of the rooted perceptions of classification of living beings. The extend body can and is an amalgamation of the human extended phenotype with tissue life - a unfiled body for disembodied living fragments, an ontological device, set to draw attention to the need of re-examining current taxonomies and hierarchical perceptions of life.

Josephine Bosma

language, voice, song, body, code, music, social, authorship, folk data

The relationship between code and language, cultures, and machine has started being analyzed quite profoundly the past few years, yet how does code relate to human voice? Code is an interesting mixture of human and machine languages, of social and mathematical communication. With the work of Florian Cramer as an inspiration and big influence I would like to speculate wildly about how code not only reflects a changing attitude in the transcription and creation of meaning, but also on how this in turn reverberates in the use of our human voice, specifically in the arts.