ROY ASCOTT · Syncretic Strategies
A pioneer of cybernetic and telematic art, Ascott is an internationally renowned artist, theorist, and educator. Roy Ascott is the founder and President of the Planetary Collegium, the Director of its CAiiA-Hub, and Professor of Technoetic Art in the University of Plymouth, England. He is Visiting Professor in Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. Ascott's work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou Paris, Ars Electronica Linz, V2 Holland, Milan Triennale, and European Media Festival, Osnabrück.
TANIA FRAGA · Envisioning Possibilities for Computer Art & Design
Tania Fraga reflects on the role of interactive computer art as it looks for new metaphors to disclose potential functionalities for human–computer interaction, entrusting computers with boring tasks, sometimes searching for ways to make them more similar to intelligent beings, at others seeking for more symbiotic forms of interaction and the emergence of the best of these two systems, the natural and the artificial.
Tania Fraga is a Brazilian architect and artist. She holds a PhD on the Communication and Semiotics Program at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC) with a Post Doctoral at CAiiA-STAR. She was Professor and Co-ordinator of the Graduation Studies of the Art Institute at University of Brasilia, Brazil, from 1987-2004 and member of the Advisory Research Committee of the Banff New Media Centre in 2003, Canada. She was Visiting Scholar at the Computer Science Department at The George Washington University, Washington DC, 1991/1992 and Artist-in-Residence at The Bemis Foundation, USA, 1986, with a grant from the Fulbright Commission.
HÉLÈNE FRICHOT · An Ethico-Aesthetics for Wet Architectures
Architects engaged in experimental practice are increasingly returning to the study of life forms for inspiration. Although the so-called natural world has always provided formal tropes to the architect, the underlying processes of biological life now drive design research. In their biomimetic investigations creative practitioners are advised to equip themselves with a working knowledge of calculus, not to mention evolutionary science, and to remake themselves as technicians and/or scientists of an electronic realm of discrete bits, ready to take on genetic algorithmic adventures. A combinatory of computer science and biology has given rise to a term that has been gaining increasing currency, emergence. The surging forth of self-organised life in the emergence of complex and novel systems promises the wonder of built forms that become living organisms, or a wet architecture. What is at stake in this artificial animation of architecture? What practical ethics might be engaged such that these experiments augment rather than diminish the continuance of life in formation, whether individual, social, human or other?
Hélène Frichot is a senior lecturer in architectural design and theory at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. While architecture is her first discipline, she holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sydney. Hélène co-curates the RMIT University Architecture + Philosophy Public Lecture Series
FREIDRICH KIRSCHNER · Playing games differently
Presented as spontaneous live performance, the session will illustrate how to use computer games in a more imaginative way. Including household input devices and other rarely seen interfaces for content creation.
Friedrich Kirschner is a filmmaker, visual artist and board member of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences. He re-purposes computer games to create animated narratives and interactive performances. His work has been shown at various international animation festivals and exhibitions, including the ZKM Karlsruhe, the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the Ottawa international Animation festival and the Seoul Media Art Biennale. He also published machinimag, an online magazine focussing on the development of the emerging art form of machinima moviemaking.
PAUL MAJKUT · Cool Media, Cold Consequences
(1) A new medium is inadequately discussed within the frame and terminology of an older medium-film in terms of stage drama, new media in terms of television/cinema-preventing understanding and full artistic use of the new medium;
(2) despite Bill Gates, bad metaphoric descriptions of new media ('information superhighway', 'scroll', 'page', etc.) are misleading: Leibniz pointed out, "Monads have no windows";
(3) the 'coldness' of 'cool' digital media results from quantitative interactivity that precludes empathy; the conflation of perceptual interactivity and empathetic intersubjectivity causes practice and theory to remain at odds;
(4) the internet is the ideal tool for interpellating ideology in global capitalism;
(5) the medieval seven deadly sins offer an alternative framework for understanding corporatist ideology.
Paul Majkut, an award-winning investigative journalist, is Professor of Literature in the College of Letters and Science, National University, San Diego, California, and international lecturer. Majkut has twice been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.
ANNA MUNSTER · Crowds, Power and Portable Media
Munster investigates representations of 'the crowd' and looks at such terms as 'mob', 'swarm' and 'collective intelligence' to seek their origins. Do the images of crowds we receive via the network society, or via television and print media, elucidate or obscure the portable and mobile crowd? The recent 'race riots' (in Cronulla, in Paris, in the Philippines, the LA riots of 1992 and 1995) have been a persistent media and juridical construction of the crowd as unwieldy and as catalysed into violence by the use of unregulated portable media such as pagers and mobile phones. Munster explores the political production of 'the crowd' as immanently destructive and considers what interests might be served by this construction.
Anna Munster is a writer, artist and lecturer in the area of electronic and new media arts and is a Senior Lecturer at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.
MELENTIE PANDILOVSKI · The Fundamental Change
It is hard to comprehend the full impact of the processes to which we are subjected at the beginning of the 21st century. The discourses are ever-evolving, but these theoretical and practical developments have the potential to cause a tectonic shift in our culture: we witness a process of change–away from traditional understandings and towards the direction by which we will experience the world at the intersection of the engineered and the biological.
Melentie Pandilovski is the Director of the Experimental Art Foundation. He was initiator and Director/Curator of the annual Skopje Electronic Arts Fair, the first internet and media art manifestation in the Balkans, and has written extensively on the present state of media arts and the future of technology and arts.
EDDO STERN · "Presenting 'Sheik Attack' "
Eddo Stern will present his Machinima film 'Sheik Attack".
Sheik Attack is a contemporary non/fiction horror film woven from pop nostalgia, computer war games, the sweat of virtual commandos, the blood of Sheiks and a mis-remembrance of a long lost Zionist Utopia. "A former Israeli soldier, Stern spliced together selections from the video games Settlers III, SumCity, Nuclear Strike, and Red Alert to compose a "fictional documentary" about the creation, scuttled idealism, and increasing militarism of his homeland. The projected sequence of short vignettes, linked by graphics that make each scene clear as a historical phase (or a different "level" in a game), provides visual metaphors for real events. In opening scenes, for instance, construction workers erect a single building in an empty landscape, representing the nation's folk origins; later, a seemingly boundless cityscape signifies a burgeoning Tel Aviv. Yet nothing is now so intuitively correct about the piece as its episodes circling violence. One gorgeous scene depicts a single assault helicopter lifting off the desert floor before drifting behind a dune; Stern incorporates cinematic dissolves to underscore the poetry of the machine's turn ing blades. In the final moments we're presented with cold-blooded shootings in a domestic habitat. Nearly all these scenes are accompanied by nostalgic Israeli songs, whose slow, languorous phrasings create the kind of paradoxical, aestheticized violence familiar from John Woo films." Tim Griffin, "Eddo Stern - Reviews: New York," ArtForum. Jan, 2003
Eddo Stern is an artist and computer game designer. He was born in Tel Aviv and currently lives in Los Angeles. His work explores new modes of narrative and documentary, fantasies of technology and history, and cross-cultural representation in film, computer games, and the Internet. He works in various media including computer game design, modification and programming, building kinetic sculptures and electronic devices, producing film, video, and public video game performances. His site is www.eddostern.com. He is a founder of C-level, a cooperative media lab in LA's Chinatown - www.c-level.org. http://www.eddostern.com
ANDREAS STRÖHL · Apparatus Images – How the Apparatus Swallows Meaning and Projects Ideology
In Western modernity, art has been assigned the position and role of rebel, and contemporary practices are based on the aesthetic notion of deviation and a continuous violation of borders. The media arts (arts that have made use of technically complex machines rather than simple tools) creatively assault the apparatus they employ and the rules, laws or intentions inscribed into and embodied by them. Technical images, however, refer to (and mean) these framing written texts. Flusser's version of the 'end of history' had it that everything that happens today aims at becoming TV: so, these texts are highly ideological and of enormous political impact. Is there a war going on between art and the apparatus?
Andreas Ströhl was Director of Cultural Program of the Goethe Institute in Prague until 1997 and since 2004 has been Director of the Munich International Film Festival. |
