archives

Singapore.
The first full day at ISEA 2008 starts with a number of parallel paper sessions - and the first paper in one of these sessions is mine (that is, the paper I've co-authored with Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai). I've posted the slides below, and will try to record the audio as well the audio is up now, too.

The next paper is by Atteqa Malik, who begins with a political rock video from Pakistan that has now been parodied by the Pakistani lawyers' movement (replacing rock musicians with lawyers, etc.). That movement, and other online and offline protests, is in response to the takeover of mainstream Pakistani media during the Musharraf regime, of course - indeed, there has been an explosion of media channels in Pakistan in recent years. One further catalyst for such developments was the 2005 earthquake, which created a strong response from younger generations.

Singapore.
We're still in the first paper session at ISEA 2008 - but I'll start a new post for the next three presentations. The next speaker is Konrad Becker, who has previously published the Tactical Reality Dictionary and is now working on a Strategic Reality Dictionary to complement it. He notes that tactical media spontaneity nonetheless relies on the availability of underlying infrastructures, raising questions around the strategic dimension. Tactics are more strongly related to temporal considerations, strategies to spatial issues. Konrad now shows a matrix tracing different combinations of space and time, and points to scientific understandings of time and space.

Singapore.
The post-lunch session of this first full day at ISEA 2008 starts for me with a bunch of papers grouped under the overall title of 'Transforming Media'. Janez Strehovec is the first presenter, and his interest is in new media art as research. He begins by noting the wide-ranging and diverse nature of new media art. Common to many new media artworks is the lack of stability for the artefacts that are being created - artefacts are no longer stable, material art works, but instead art is reconceptualised as process. This also undermines the 'artist as genius' stereotype.

Singapore.
Next up here at ISEA 2008 is Daniela Alina Plewe. Her interest is in the connection of art and business - and she asks about the potential for doing art around business. Interactive media themselves are often used in an economic context, of course, where interactions are also financial transactions. There is a good potential for developing interactive/transactive media works, then; art mash-ups could resemble online businesses.

This could build on the tradition of art about business, of business around art, of art as investment. But what is important here is the dimension of interaction and transaction. In interaction, there is an exchange of meaning, in transaction, there is an exchange of value; and this may take place in the artwork itself, or around it.

Singapore.
The ISEA 2008 keynote this evening is by Sam Furukawa, a former president and CEO of Microsoft Japan who is now at Keio University in the Graduate School of Media Design. He's reflecting today on Singapore's high-profile Artist-in-Residence (AIR) programme: how is artistic work connected to corporate and societal expectations?

Sam was editor-in-chief of ASCII Computer Magazine in 1977; in 1979 he developed its software engineering department and moved on to Microsoft in 1981. However, he also released the Japanese edition of BSD Unix in 1984, and returned as the first president of Microsoft Japan and became its chairman in 1991. He retired from Microsoft in 2005 and started at Keio University the following year. Additionally, he's also the chairman of the Japanese Association of Model Railroading and has published several books on railroads - an impressive resume...