ISEA 2008

Singapore.
Day three at ISEA 2008 starts with a paper by Nedine Kachornnamsong, who has developed an art installation for Copenhagen airport. She begins by reflecting on the purpose of such an installation - most travellers are likely just to move quickly and painlessly through the airport space, rather than linger and appreciate the art. What is the sense of place that exists in an airport?

Copenhagen is a hub for Scandinavian air travel, and acts as a transit airport for transfers into the nordic countries. It incorporates a great deal of Scandinavian design (including significant use of wood in interior spaces); for an airport, it's a very pretty space, but this may remain secondary to many travellers for whom the airport remains simply a transitional space. What is remembered, mostly, are the bad experiences travellers may have - delays, lost luggage, unfriendly staff.

Singapore.
The keynote lecture this afternoon at ISEA 2008 is by Creative Commons co-founder Lawrence Lessig, speaking on the proper place of copyright. He begins in 1906, when John Philip Sousa went to Congress to rail against the recently invented record player. The new technology, he suggested, would undermine cultural participation (a kind of read-write participation) - record players were 'infernal machines' which would promote the development of a 'read-only' culture, driven by commercial agendas. (Sousa was taunted in response with the suggestion that copyright already prevented participation in a read-write culture, however - a suggestion he strongly rejected.)

Singapore.
My afternoon session at ISEA 2008 is on copyright and the Creative Commons in Asia. In the first place, this begins with the official launch of the Creative Commons licencing suite for Singaporean copyright law - the 47th such translation into a national legislative framework.

CC co-founder Lawrence Lessig is here to do the honours, and he outlines some of the basic tenets of the Creative Commons philosophy now: in particular, the need to allow for a suite of licences which could offer a more sophisticated model for licencing content beyond the 'all rights reserved' model of copyright itself. This model, of course, has been forcefully exported from the U.S. to the rest of the world - and CC offers a different approach: not a disrespect for copyright, but a different understanding of copyright licencing.

Singapore.
The morning session on this second day at ISEA 2008 continues with Caroline McCaw and Rachel Gillies, with a project related to Dunedin in New Zealand. Overall, there is a series of 20 place-responsive public artworks across New Zealand by national and international artists; the Dunedin component involves three artists (Douglas Bagnall, Adam Hyde, and Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich) in separate locations around the world collaborating over the Internet - one of these locations was Edinburgh, after which Dunedin is partially named.

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...

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.
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 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.
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.

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...