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Transaction, Rematerialisation, and Visualisation in Digital Art

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.

Creative Practice, as Research or Otherwise

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.

Tactics, Strategies, Distribution, and Collaboration

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.

Network Politics, Political Networks

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.

Japanese Pop Culture and Its Impacts

Singapore.
After a quick refreshment break with some tasty Singaporean food, we're now in a plenary panel session at ISEA 2008, on culture, technology, and Asian (or as it turns out, mainly Japanese) pop culture. Blogging panels is always difficult, but we'll see how it goes.

Adrian Cheok begins by noting the shift in policy in Asia towards a greater focus on cultural development in addition to science and technology (linked in part to the embrace of the idea of creative industries in Asia, of course). In particular, though, it's the interlinkage of culture and technology that's particularly productive here.

Creative Brains in Singapore

Singapore.
I'm spending the next few days at the ISEA 2008 conference in steamy Singapore. My last ISEA was 2004 in Helsinki and Tallinn (and on the cruise ship to Helsinki), an experience which will be very hard to top - but I'm sure the local organisers have a great deal of interesting events in store for us, too. ISEA - the International Symposium on Electronic Art - is always a strange beast: a wild mixture of new media artists and performers, free culture and open source activists, and more conventional new media researchers (like me). Well, we'll see...

M/C Turns Ten Today!

Give Me M/C!Some ten and a half years ago, David Marshall - then lecturing in the English Department at the University of Queensland - had an idea. Academics around Australia, and around the world, were still coming to terms with this new-fangled thing, the Web, but publishing academic work was more often than not still linked to the slow processes of print publishing - so, David suggested, wouldn't it be great to set up a new, purely online journal that would combine rigorous academic peer review with the speed and reach that only Web-based publishing could provide. "Why not organise each issue around a one-word theme?", he asked.

Smart Services CRC Finally Launched

(Cross-posted from Produsage.org.)

Smart Services CRC Company Logo

I'm happy to report that the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre has finally been launched. It's taken far too long to get to this point (initial Australian federal government approval for the CRC application was received shortly before Christmas, 2006), but after a lengthy process of negotiations between the twenty or so universities, government bodies, and industry partners involved in the CRC, the Centre has finally been launched by the federal minister responsible, Senator Kim Carr, on 3 July 2008.

Make no mistake - with funding totalling some $120 million over its seven-year timeframe, this is a very significant development for the Australian digital services industry, as the range of partners involved in the Centre also documents. The Centre will conduct research and development across a range of domains, from financial services through education to mobile media, building on the work of its predecessor, the Smart Internet CRC.

Jill Walker's Blogging

It looks like I received my copy of the book even before the author herself did, but with the excitement of the CCi conference last week, I haven't got around to acknowledging it yet: Jill Walker Rettberg's book Blogging is now out. Congratulations!

Jill, of course, is one of the world's best-known academic bloggers, and so I was very pleased to offer an endorsement for the back cover. Here's what I wrote:

Copyright Perspectives in a Web 2.0 Context

Brisbane.
The final session here at the CCi conference is billed as a copyright perspectives panel in the context of user-led content creation on Web 2.0. The panel begins with Oli Wilson from New Zealand indie band Knives at Noon and Otago University. Knives at Noon released its EP online under a Creative Commons 3.0 (BY-NC-SA) licence, free to share and remix for non-commercial purposes. The band was somewhat unhappy with the content of the EP itself, but wanted this creative material not to be wasted - they hoped that it would take on a life of its own by releasing it online as a ProTools source file (roughly following Linus Torvalds's logic in releasing the initial Linux kernel). Release in this format also allowed users to access the individual components of their tracks, not just the mixed end product - and it suited the band's creative philosophy.

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