ELLEN HARTWELL ALDERMAN || Phenomenal Translucency in Toyo Ito’s T House
University of Illinois, Chicago, Art History, PhD
Spatial Experience and Social Networking
As computers and mobile devices steadily become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives, so too do the communications and information networks that they enable. What effect has this increasing engagement with ever expanding networks had on the ways in which we negotiate built spaces and relate to those around us? Has channel surfing, web browsing, email and text messaging changed our patterns of attention and movement through domestic spaces?
In light of these questions about technology, built space and human relationships, this text explores the T House, a residential project designed by Toyo Ito and built between 1997 and 1999 in Tokyoʼs urban center. Close attention is paid to how this home organizes the activities and interrelations of the residents as they can be read through floor plans and photographs. These observations will be considered in relation to Itoʼs writings about the nature of contemporary and future architecture in the digital age. The analysis of this project is rooted strongly in both the fast-paced, mediarich world of Tokyo and the persistence of traditional Japanese notions about the home and nature. It has been conducted with a consideration of the humanistic possibilities of Itoʼs synthesis and extension of modern architectural ideals, especially in his approach to transparency and translucency.
Ideas about the coexistence of virtual and actual spaces in residential architecture are discussed, in addition to the ways in which these competing
spaces can be negotiated through the use of translucent architectural materials and plan. Importance is placed on the subjective effects created by such an architecture
for its inhabitants, especially in terms of its potential to moderate privacy and presence.
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KELLY JACLYNN ANDRÉS || Shells, Membranes and Bicycle Horns
Concordia University, Montréal,
Interdisciplinary Studies, PhD
Sound Junctures
This presentation constructs a visual analysis between living or biological entities and the process of translation, absorption, or re-appropriation into the realms of art, science and engineering - focusing on technological innovation in telecommunications and using the shape of the horn as a key reference. For example, in the 17th century, Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit scholar and generalist, worked to combine many different fields such as theology, the living sciences, music and medicine and notably, invented the first megaphone and numerous drawings of acoustic communication systems that used giant forms resembling shells or twisted animal horns for acoustic transmission through large buildings. Kircher's diagrams of such inventions provide a fascinating starting point for an analysis of biomimetics in early scientific experimentation. It is timely to consider the potential consequences of using design from living materials in combination with all powerful contemporary technologies. In recent literature, biomimetics is often positioned as an open-ended opportunity for scientists and engineers to appropriate systems and design from living organisms to create indestructible, robust, and nanoscale technological devices - what can these unlimited discoveries mean in terms of new telecommunications methods in the near future? What are specific ethical issues that should be brought to the forefront in this field?
SONG‐MING ANG || Operations and Institutions
Goldsmiths, University of London,
Department of Visual Cultures
Sound Junctures
This paper looks at two artists, Brian Eno and Cory Arcangel, and how they engage in “performing the system(s)” in which their work are derived from and situated in. The systems they employ in their art, ranging from compositional/computing algorithms to heuristic operations, connect with various other systems – capitalism, communication, and culture.
Eno’s theoretical underpinnings of Ambient music is explored in its relation to the efficiencies and effects of generative art and experimental music, specifically how they expand on notions of organization, labour, and productivity. Arcangel’s new media practice, which can be seen as an extension of Eno’s work, represents a contemporary practice capable of initiating a non‐paranoid paradigm.
Through both artists’ works, the paper shows how they perform institutional critique by moving away from being institutionalized (i.e. co‐opted) by their very systems, and instead instituting (i.e. beginning) gestures that are not merely subversive but productive to various fields.
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JAIME AUSTIN || Space, Identity, and Embodiment—On Lynn Hershman Leeson's The Dante Hotel and Life Squared
California College of the Arts, Curatorial Practice,
MA
Body, Identity and the Virtual Space
In this essay I will argue that The Dante Hotel and Life Squared are interrelated yet independent site- specific artworks that similarly dissolve the boundaries between virtual and actual space.
In 1973, when the artist Lynn Hershman created a site-specific installation within a rented hotel room in the Hotel Dante, virtual space existed solely in memory and ideation. By 2006, when Hershman regenerated the Hotel Dante within Second Life, it was possible to inhabit, own, and occupy virtual space.
The Dante Hotel and Life Squared offer the opportunity to investigate issues of identity, embodiment,
and the changing nature of space within the work of one artist over a thirty-three year time span. The
fluid repurposing of space that takes place within these works reveals how, over time, society’s
relationship to space has shifted from privileging the actual to glorifying the virtual, largely due to the
ubiquitous presence of digital technology.
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LA TANYA S. AUTRY || In and Out of the Margins, “Click!: A Crowd-Curated Exhibition?”
University of Delaware,
Art History
Between the Spectator and the Spectacle
In and Out of the Margins, “Click!: A Crowd-Curated Exhibition?” This essay focuses on how a theory of collective participation was enacted in a visual arts context. The Brooklyn Museum’s 2008 project, “Click!: A Crowd-Curated Exhibition” (Click!), consisted of three parts: an open call for digital photography responding to the theme “Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” an online evaluation, and a physical exhibition of the most favored works. The exhibition, largely composed of landscapes and portraiture, drew broad attention. However, most art world insiders dismissed the show as mediocre in quality. Instead of framing Click! simply as a social involving issues of authorship, authenticity, and the role of the museum. Through an analysis of the methods of participation, this essay argues that the museum’s control over the online curation process limited opportunities for public collaboration. Thus Click! was actually confirmation of the museum’s ability to curate the crowd.
MEREDITH A. BAK || Picturing Nature: Guided Picture Tours and the View-Master as Ideological Apparatus
University of California, Santa Barbara,
Film and Media Studies, PhD
Process and the Aesthetics of Digital Art
This paper examines View-Master reel sets of American National Parks, and considers the media format of the View-Master as a distinct ideological mode that encourages a particular mode of sensory engagement and inscription of the natural world. View-Master reel sets, containing a total of twenty-one stereo images and often accompanied by illustrated booklets, take the narrative format of “Guided Picture Tours” and lead their viewers through a visual shorthand version of the physical spaces depicted on the discs. Utilizing the work of several cultural theorists, my paper constructs a critical framework to explain the View-Master’s success, and historicizes and examines several salient concepts at work that might otherwise remain neutral or unproblematized. Notions of “nature” and “the natural” will be explored, and the role of the toy—especially one that so integrally relies upon the exercise of human perceptual capabilities (binocular vision)—will be challenged as mechanisms through which particular ideologically-charged ways of looking, seeing, or apprehending the natural environment are encouraged, while other perspectives remain obscured.
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ZACH BLAS || Queer Technologies: Toward a Viral Aesthetic
Duke University,
Literature & Information Science + Information Studies, PhD
Process and the Aesthetics of Digital Art
This paper addresses the methodologies designed by art group Queer Technologies to configure new queer modes of biosociality and relationality in the realms of art, political activism, and consumer capitalism. As founder of this organization, I would like to focus upon QT’s use of brand design, mass production, and deployment as a viral relational aesthetic, an erratic exploitation of normative relationalities that produces queer affects as a replicating difference of never-being-the-sameness.
Queer Technologies is a company, an art collective, and an activist group that produces a product line for queer technological agency, interventions, and social formation.
QT products include transCoder, a queer programming anti-language;
ENgenderingGenderChangers, a “solution” to Gender Adapters’ male/female binary; Gay
Bombs, a technical manual manifesto that outlines a “how to” of queer networked
activism; and a data visualization application named GRID that tracks the dissemination
of QT products and maps the “battle plans” for spreading and infection. Queer
Technologies’ products are often displayed and deployed at the Disingenuous Bar, which
offers a heterotopic space of political support for “technical” problems. QT products are
also shop-dropped in various consumer electronics stores, such as Best Buy, Circuit City,
Radio Shack, and Target.
Project Website: http://www.queertechnologies.info
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LORNE SHAWN BLYTHE || Cartesian Illusions: Cognitive Science and Representations
of Subjective Time in Visual Art
School of Visual Arts,
MFA Photography, Video and Related Media
Perception, Information and Temporality
Two models of consciousness are considered relative to subjective representations of time. The first and perhaps most common
position—Cartesian Materialism—articulates consciousness as a kind of theatre, wherein content bearing cognitive states are
brought together upon a centralized stage. Here, order of arrival on stage is definitive of consciousness of temporal order. The
second model—Daniel Dennettʼs and Marcel Kinsbourneʼs Multiple Drafts Model—views conscious states as being both temporally
and spatially ʻsmeared.ʼ Content bearing states are dispersed in time and space within the brain. There is no single, definitive
stream of consciousness by which such contents are brought together, but rather multiple streams, each undergoing constant
revision and editing. As such, the temporal properties of such contents do not determine the subjective representation of temporal
order. The Multiple Drafts model is compared, by extension, to subjective representations of time within photography, film, and
video, challenging some temporal representations while corroborating others.
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MICHAEL CAPIO || Wall Systems: Notes on Post-Digital Tendencies in Sound and Design
School of Visual Arts,
MFA Art Criticism & Writing
Sound Junctures
Today, the activities of contemporary artists working in the fields of sound and art more than ever overlap one another. As curators and critics have argued, the "inter-contextuality of artistic practice make it possible for artists to shift between positions and professions with ease by positioning themselves in new contexts and collaborations inside and outside the art world." Accordingly, the decisive competencies of artists working in sound are those "acquired outside the processes of direct production,” in the “life world.” Here, professionalism and aesthetic production become an integrative aspect of oneʼs "aptitude for mastering information," which accompanies a habitual mobility offered to artists by audiovisual media and communication technology. Design seems to be the word that best describes the fusion of these things. Moreover, my paper will draw from recent writings by Bruno Latour, Vera Bühlamm and Ina Blom to examine how the notion of “design” has directed the present discourse surrounding post- digital tendencies in sound-based production.
MATTHIAS DE GROOF || Assimilation of cinematographic techniques by African filmmakers in order to be not assimilated?
University of Antwerp,
Film Studies and Visual Culture, PhD
Between the Spectator and the Spectacle
Both Hollywood and Colonial films made themselves available for assimilation by African audiences, due to their
semantic malleability and their susceptibility to local meanings and practices. Conclusions of media-anthropologic
studies (Ambler, Maltby, Convents, Reynolds, Larkin, Gondola, Mulenda and Kaninda) point towards the hypothesis
that it is not the content (which is appropriated and reinvented by African audiences) but the medium itself, with
its intrinsic elements such as time, space and narration that constitute the (colonizing) message. The question
whether assimilation of a media-text implies ‘being assimilated’, to put in Senghor’s words, must be transposed to
the level of the production of media-texts. Does the appropriation of the means of production and the
cinematographic technique by African filmmakers – which counters the alienation caused by the impossibility to
make their own image in colonial times – paradoxically and unwillingly implies also a ‘being alienated?’ If so, how
is deconstruction of Western imagery on Africa possible when African filmmakers rely on ‘shooting back’?
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JELANI GOULD-BAILEY || Harmonics
School of Visual Arts,
MFA Computer Art
Sound Junctures
Harmonics is an interactive audio-visual installation that explores the connections
between ancient Indian philosophy, western musical theory and contemporary physics. This
research paper explores the theoretical, historical and cultural concepts which lead to the
development of the project; specifically, ancient Indian philosophy, western musical theory
(Pythagorean harmonics), contemporary western physics (string/M-theory) and prior interactive
audio-visual works. Ideas regarding interconnectedness, vibration (frequency), and harmony
from these various disciplines are explored in regards to the project’s central question: “can
users can achieve a sense of musical harmony by interacting with this system, regardless of
musical background or prior knowledge?”. Harmonics is also investigated within an art historical
framework, whereby the project is compared with experimental films and previous interactive
installations and evaluated using criteria developed by Myron Krueger in the essay “Responsive
Environments”.
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AMANDA GRAHAM || The Body of The Text: Dispersion and Its Implications in Shelley Jackson’s Skin: A Mortal Work of Art
University of Rochester,
Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, PhD
Spatial Experience and Social Networking
The Body of The Text: Dispersion and Its Implications in Shelley Jackson’s Skin: A Mortal Work of Art With her project Skin: A Mortal Work of Art author Shelley Jackson publishes a story, one word at a time, on the bodies of volunteers. These participants who each agree to have a singular word
tattooed in Baskerville font on their bodies become members of a living “imagined community” of language sustained by Jackson’s Ineradicable Stain website. Significantly, on the site and in interviews Jackson refers to her dispersed subjects as the words they wear. I will argue that by breaking the frame of the text and story as narrative trope, and also freeing her words from the page, she has created new boundaries for language, among them the human body and its life span. I will also assert that including human participants in her experiment with text is more than a ‘novel’ idea. Framing human beings as words has ramifications including sacrificing the autonomy of the subject.
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DUSTIN GRELLA || Processing Prayers for Peace
School of Visual Arts,
MFA Computer Art
Process and the Aesthetics of Digital Art
This paper explores the different approaches of process-based artists, both analog and digital, and questions whether or not their
techniques were capable of conveying emotion. The paper then focuses on the work of artist Dustin Grella in the same context,
investigating earlier works as well as his most recent project, a stop-motion animation, Prayers for Peace.
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ELAINE W. HO and SEAN SMITH || Unlayering the Relational: Microaesthetics and Micropolitics
European Graduate School,
Media and Communications Program, PhD
Between the Spectator and the Spectacle
Unlayering the Relational: Microaesthetics and Micropolitics
With the weakening of neoliberal capitalism, the strengthening of a networked mode of being, and the increasing complexity of
disparate forms of existence within culture, politics, economics, religion and ethics, it is no wonder we turn again to a kind of
relationality within art, whereby micropolitics speaks as much about Rancièrean aesthetics as it does about “a way of being
together.” To engage an artistic practice in this manner implies smooth passage through spatial and temporal layers from local to
global—counter-workings of art and politics as a form of maneuvering rather than as a fixed subjectivity. Supplementing our own
practices as theorists and artists in Toronto and Beijing with the work of Agamben, Flusser, and of course, Bourriaud, this
presentation will discuss the sporting multitude and the non-community of the everyday in relation to a micropolitics of aesthetics
and a microaesthetics of politics.
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DOUG JARVIS || Ghosts as an Audience
University of Guelph, Ontario,
School of Fine Arts and Music
Between the Spectator and the Spectacle
Ghosts as an audience for contemporary art - 2009
My research explores the constructs of space, audience and spectral entities to develop a gallery installation that engages the
possibility of ghosts and other non-material entities as direct participants in my artwork.
I propose that the concept of a contemporary art audience could be expanded to include non-material entities such as ghosts. I am
interested to extend what is considered a participant in the completion of a work of art. Generally, we assume participation is limited
to only humans. I will challenge this idea with the assistance of digital avatars, specifically, the Second Life avatar performance art
group Second Front that I co-founded in 2006. Traditionally, avatars are the manifestation of deities in ancient Sanskrit mythology.
They are an appropriate metaphor to examine how digital technology can facilitate the articulation of entities in a virtual world, and
contribute to expanding the language of space.
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JENNY KEANE || Fragmented Fetishes: Monstrosity and Desire in Women’s Contemporary Time-Based Art
University of Ulster, Belfast,
Department of Art, Design and the Built Environment
Body, Identity and the Virtual Space
Horror connects to one of our most ancient and primal desires: Voyeurism. The imagery of death and evil could be a metaphor for art itself – the irrepressible desire to look. This paper will question how and why this concept of monstrous subversion, through the utilization of themes including the abject, Gothic, horror film, and representations of the ‘monstrous-feminine’, has arisen at this time in women’s art, particularly in time-based mediums. Throughout this paper I will concentrate on my own practice as an artist as well as discussing works by contemporary video artists Chloe Piene, Sue de Beer and Gabriela Fridriksdottir. The artists investigate the liminal state of the aberrant, visceral female body through cultural representations within the horror film, and rather than eschew the long-standing patriarchal perception of feminine monstrosity – the ‘lack’, these female artists appropriate and employ this transgressive mode of video art practice to engender new compelling ways of looking, and new subversive ways of seeing.
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NIPUN KUMAR || Intervention or Interference of Digital Technologies in Interior Design - Developing Spatial Digital Experience
Rhode Island School of Design,
Digital+Media
Spatial Experience and Social Networking
As screen based interaction with digital media empowered by sound and mobile capabilities dominate human computer interaction, efforts in locative media art works and physical computing projects are trying to integrate space itself to achieve a more spatially real digital experience. As the concept of embodiment is now catching fire in the world of electronics, the space around is also getting immaterialized at a much faster pace because the quality of immersive bubble space created by these objects supersedes persons consciousness of the real space.
Most of the urban population spend a majority of their time inside an architectural shell which is called an interior. I will focus on potential of digital technologies being employed in this interior space to dynamically alter the state of deadened architectural interior. To enhance the sensation of space we have light, sound, projections, cameras, sensors, materials, electronic devices and mechanical systems which can be controlled digitally to explore the potential of superimposing effects which affect the space.
PIERRE LEICHNER || From Transcendence to ‘Altercendence’?
University of Concordia, Montréal, Faculty of Fine Arts,
MFA
Perception, Information and Temporality
There seems to be a renewed interest in the last couple decades in studying and writing about consciousness. Consciousness may be the most difficult question humans are trying to resolve. Yet eliciting transcendence, a phenomenon that rises above, or goes beyond, normal limits of consciousness, has been an identified goal for many artists in the past, possibly even in cave art. Drawing on works shown in the 2006 Art Gallery of Hamilton exposition called Sublime Embrace: Experiencing Consciousness in Contemporary Art and in the 2002 Houston Contemporary Art Museum 2002 show called THE INWARD EYE: Transcendence in Contemporary Art I will explore the biological, psychological, cultural and spiritual facets of transcendence. Perhaps, with the renewed symbiotic relationship between the sciences and art, the convergence of digital media and the emergence of global communication networks, we are at the verge of art that will create a change, an alteration in our consciousness, an altercendent state. What this change will be is yet a mystery.
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ALEKSANDRA PRZEGALINSKA || Identity negotiation in human-avatar relations
The New School for Social Research, Department of Sociology,
MA
Body, Identity and the Virtual Space
“By 2040 we can have robots that are smart as we are. Eventually, these machines will begin their own process of evolution and render us extinct in our present form.” (Hans Moravec)
How often do we encounter “things” talking to us? There are greeting cards
speak when we open them, elevators that tell us what floor we have reached,
and answering machines that report the details of our incoming calls.
On the everyday basis we engage in dialogs with machines. It seems that
whereas steel production was the main theme of scientific discourse in the
1800s and electric-power generation in the first half of the 1900s, the late
20th as well as the beginning of the 21st century is dominated by the idea
of human-machine interactivity. This “state” of constantly potential and occasionally
realized interactivity is achieved, among others, by means of virtual agents
(avatars) which possess certain humanoid features. In spite of the increasing
frequency of our contacts with avatars, a broad sociological analysis of “human-avatar”
relations has not yet been conducted. Therefore, this research project is designed
as a small contribution to this not yet established, but surely emerging field.
Its ultimate point of reference is the idea of identity as a process that is
constructed by encountering other – in this case by such technological solutions
that are targeted to embody human being interactions in a daily routine. Thus,
the main concern is how understanding self-reference could help explain the
notion of identity so that we might recognize it inside very complicated structures
such as computing, mechanized, and yet “thinking” machinery.
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KURT RALSKE || Data and Time: Information Storage and Paradigms of Temporality
School of Visual Arts,
MFA Art Criticism and Writing
Perception, Information and Temporality
The defining function of information technologies, both ancient and modern, is the storage and retrieval of events. Various technologies provide either sequential access or random access to stored information. Cultural paradigms of temporality may exist as cyclical, linear, or non-linear: cyclical time in agricultural societies, linear time in industrial societies, and non-linear time amongst those whose world-view is metaphysical or magical.
Sequential access of data implies linear or cyclical time; random access suggests the non-linear, non-narrative temporality of magical thought. Do the tools we use reflect the ways we conceive temporality? Or rather, is our temporal sense (and its attendant ontology) inflected by the tools we have created?
Examples will be drawn from authors Paul Virilio, Fredrich Neitzche, Lev Manovich, and artists Muybridge, Marey, Edgerton, Sugimoto, Paik, and the author.
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KLARA SEDDON || Bento Blogs: Women’s Expression in Japanese Visual Food Culture
Bard
Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, MA
Body, Identity and the Virtual Space
For many Japanese mothers today, the bento (packed lunch) they prepare daily for their children is an expressive medium that can involve hours of preparation as food is manipulated into sculptural representations of popular culture. The act of preparing the bento allows the mother to infuse her daily duty with creative expression, while the child’s experience of consumption is elevated to an aesthetic event. My research involves looking at the relatively recent trend of bento blogs, where women regularly post their food-based creations on the Internet. Through such blogs, women interact with a network of like-minded women, thereby transferring the meaning of the traditional mother-child (or more broadly preparer-consumer) relationship. In this way, Japanese women simultaneously reiterate the importance of bento within Japanese socialization and the gendered role of preparing it, but claim a public avenue for their work. Blogs offer a visual and literal articulation of the work that goes into these short-lived creations.
GRAHAM SMITH || Digital Painting: Social Network 04/09
School of Visual Arts,
MFA Computer Art
Spatial Experience and Social Networking
“Social Network” and its accompanying research explore the importance of physical and emotional
connections to the success of new media art works. By creating a digital installation which addresses and
questions whether digital environments can adequately communicate emotions in a similar manner to the aura of
the unique art objects discussed by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” I hope to understand the nature of our transformed social encounters in virtual communications
such as Facebook. My research uncovers that communication through digital means can be limiting and that
there are larger social repercussions to the emotional discourse in contemporary society. Can computers be
used to express emotions and not just communicate information and ideas?
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AIMEE WALLESTON || The Aesthetics of Pixelation
School of Visual Arts,
MFA Art Criticism and Writing
Process and the Aesthetics of Digital Art
In image and design, the aesthetics of pixelation present a problem of both perception and perspective. A glimpse at the digitalized violence of contemporary, handheld, soldier-produced war footage in Iraq often alludes—at times almost seamlessly—to the pixelated, robotic images of war-themed video games. The camouflage used in American Marine Corps uniforms is pixelated: it’s the desert as seen through a digital camera’s screen. Lo-res pixelation—in surveillance imagery, for example—lends an air of authenticity to both still and moving images. On the other end of the spectrum, HD (i.e. less obvious pixelation) is the holy grail of so much digital imagery production. In this work, an exploration is made into the dichotomous feeling of intimacy and distance that pixelated images and design evoke. What mythmaking occurred that has now resulted in the endgame of an image that must appear intentionally pixelated in order to be accepted as real?
NINA WENHART || The Grammar of New Media
Danube University Krems, Austria,
Department for Image Science and
Media Art Histories
Perception, Information and Temporality
In the Grammar of New Media I critically analyze existing Media Art archives while investigating alternative strategies of capturing the “unstable” and “ephemeral” - i.e. time- and process-based works of art. Through my research into these archives, I identify the “closure” of existing archival database systems as a main problem. This closure results in a premature aging of the archives that damages their reliability and decreases their value significantly. I suggest that models of openness, such as Wittgenstein's concepts of Family Resemblances and “Sprachspiel” (Language-Game) more functionally fit the task of describing evolving systems. The lack of a standard terminology is identified as one of the main problems in archiving Media Art. To be more precise, what is meant is a lack of a standard terminology of descriptive metadata, of words that are used to interpret a piece of work. The work I propose for MediaModes 2009 is my masters thesis in Prof. Oliver Grau's Media Art History program and focuses on suggesting a possible alternative to traditional classification in the process of archiving Media Art. In my approach, I will follow Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of Family Resemblance and analyze its potential for (online) Media Art archives. The main question is if it is really the lack of a standard terminology that is an obstacle for Media Art archives or rather is a new way to deal with terminologies and categorization needed?
