Connecting New Media Artists and Cutting-Edge Technology

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...

Sam notes that the Singaporean minister for education, information, communications and the arts made the announcement last night that the government will set aside S$70m for the development of International Research Centres that are collaborations between Singaporean and international universities. One of the first of these is a collaboration between Keio University and the National University of Singapore: the Connective Ubiquitous Technology for Embodiment (CUTE) Centre, which will focus on connected lifestyle media and embodied interactive technologies.

Sam notes that in the context of media art, there is great value in connecting new and emerging artists with the cutting edge in the field of technology - and he's in a very good position to do so. He did this with young energetic artists in 1998-2004, taking them to SIGGRAPH and other major industry exhibitions and connecting them with leading artists and technologists. One of them went on to create the Motion Dive system, which is now the de facto standard for live video jockeying systems. (Sam now takes us through a number of other major new media innovators in Japan - people who created major Flash games, a virtual tour of the Louvre, Axis, the leading design magazine in Japan, and the News2U news site.)

So, artists need to find not only the funding for their work, but make the right connections and find the right opportunities for success - Sam argues against governments providing funding only as this 'spoils' artists and disconnects them from their broader context; beyond funding, artists also need to be provided with the most advanced technology in order to explore its features (which may eventually generate everyday uses). This may happen on an individual basis, but can also be supported through appropriate infrastructure within which artists can work.

Singapore's Artist-in-Residence programmes can act as such a springboard for new artists, and Sam points to Leslie Kee as an example of an artist who has successfully negotiated this process. Other programmes include the multi-university School of Internet (which operates using some high-bandwidth Net connections), the Global Studios network, and a few others. Collaboration with corporate partners are also important, as they enable the work that is created in the process to be shared with or deployed to a wider audience. The next step beyond this is commercialisation, possibly through exhibition at major industry exhibitions.

So, in other words, Sam encourages new media artists to move beyond building fragile prototypes, and instead to create works which can be embedded into and shared through consumer-level digital technologies, to ensure broad take-up and use of such works so that they can generate new ideas and innovation.

Technorati : ISEA 2008, collaboration, new media art
Del.icio.us : ISEA 2008, collaboration, new media art