archives

Singapore.
We had the closing ceremony last night already, but there's still a final day of ISEA 2008 papers to go. The morning session this Wednesday starts with Tristan Thielmann, presenting on geomedia as a potential Web 3.0. He describes this as a shift towards WWWW (who, what, when, where), and points to Google's shift towards a more strongly map-based service (which on Google Maps itself combines photos and Wikipedia content with map information, for example). Flickr, too, has announced that it will georeference all its content in the future.

Singapore.
The day five session at ISEA 2008 continues with Greg Giannis. He presents his work through a mapping interface he's been working on for some time; the aim here is to engage in subjective mapping - which maps media objects (texts, images, sound, video) captured live while moving in the physical work onto a map operated through an experimental Website. Display on the Website uses what Greg calls semantic zooming - more information from captured objects is revealed as the user focusses on them by zooming in.

Such mapping aims to investigate our sense of place, and there is currently something of a crisis in the cartographic community, Greg suggests, driven by changes in approaches to mapping; the community is looking towards artists to help them develop new approaches to cartography, and this is similar perhaps to the crisis in art as it emerged with the advent of photography. What's especially interesting here is the possibility of collective mapping (which can also serve as a form of collective resistance against the increasingly engineered sense of individual subjectivity).

Singapore.
The ISEA 2008 conference is pretty much over now - the last event broadly connected with it is a talk by new media theorist Lev Manovich in the beautiful Lasalle arts space. With a title of "Cultural Analytics", I wouldn't be so surprised if this was going to be pretty close to what my colleagues at QUT have in mind when they talk about cultural science...

His aim here is to extrapolate from current to future cultural trends, and he notes that such futurism is traditionally very difficult. Part of his approach, therefore, is to develop new projects with his students which may have the potential to set new trends themselves. Overall, he says, we'll see a very significant new cultural development that builds on data mining and data visualisation technologies.