New Media Arts

London.


Next at Transforming Audiences is Nicola Kaye, who focusses on developing communicative spaces through her creative practice. This is in line with the idea that the role of the artist is now to construct the social spaces and constraints for the audience to co-construct the work, and builds on the increasing availability of digital, social, creative tools such as Flickr or YouTube while highlighting the as yet undecided power structures within such spaces. Creativity has an important role to play in examining the potential uses for such spaces.

Frankfurt.


The final speaker here at the Prosumer Revisited conference is Gerhard Panzer, whose interest is in the consumption of cultural goods. Such cultural consumption can be defined as the purchase and/or use of cultural works and services; these are objects that have specific embedded meanings, whose quality is realised through the process of reception. Their value is determined through attention and recognition; consumers of such objects are therefore co-producers of (the value of) cultural works.

Cultural producers, in turn, are also consumers of other cultural producers' works, and are influenced by their wider environment (competitors, financiers, publishers, audiences, etc.). This influence may have taken place against the wishes of cultural producers (where patrons or publishers altered works) or may have been specifically sought out by cultural producers (for example through live performance). Indeed, markets for cultural products are themselves also complex networks of institutions.

Athens.


The third panellist at WebSci '09 is Olga Pozeli. She says that film appeared in the late 1800s, and was exhibited at first in music halls - the first properly exhibited movie was a comedy. Film and theatre have long been aligned, and film provides a magic spectacle. The use of technological innovations in film and theatre has been artistically and politically justified by many filmmakers and dramatists along the way, but there has also been criticism of this, arguing especially that technologically augmented theatre was in effect apologising for not being film.

Athens.


The next panellist at WebSci '09 is Michael Marmarinos, and he begins by presenting himself as 'a normal human being'. He notes the increasing speed of human communication as it is augmented by the Internet, the Web - and in the face of this, he feels awe, and the enthusiasm of the ignorant. Technology is in conversation with time, and as speed increases, we become smaller.

The speed of change is difficult to assess while change takes place - it may be amazing and scary at the same time. He suggests that the speed of change can be described mathematically as our ability to change divided by the range of possibilities which we can imagine, and this fraction tends towards one (if I've got this right - I do appreciate the live interpretation, but I wish the interpreter would bloody well sit still rather than noisily fidgeting about in her cabin, and chewing gum!).

Athens.


The cultural convergence session at WebSci '09 continues with a panel composed of Greek musicians, actors, and directors. Electronic musician Konstantinos Bita, who began his work on Ataris and Amigas, reflects on his introduction to digital technology, and the gradually growing importance of electronic networks - using modems at first, and then connecting more directly to the Internet. In the early days, access was often free, but then commercial interests began to build their walled gardens with the aim to enrich themselves; with Web 2.0, Konstantinos believes, a further change will occur which further isolates people and locks them into online pursuits without providing real sociality.