Panels, Workshops and Platforms:

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Wednesday, 26 August 2009

Educational and Artistic Practice for the Convergence of Art and Technology in Korea

The Convergence of art and technology, and art and science has been pronounced loudly for a long time globally and locally. While the artistic practice of the convergence has been done practically and still goes on actively, the educational practice and its result are problematic and various following local contexts, which are educational systems, academic traditions, social understanding and cultural recognition.

Here, we, three professors will introduce and talk on the Korean college education of the convergence of art and technology using our practical experience for almost 10 years since 2000, and bring out problems in the education with our artistic-scholastic collaborative practices in media art. South Korea has been known as a well-IT-equipped country, but the traditional academic and educational system keeps two major divisions of art and science exclusively. Simply put, mathematics-based and nonmathematics- based, literature-based and non-literature-based, and art-based and non-art-based since the high school education.

We, educators and scholars, have made efforts to overcome the mutual lack at the college-undergraduate level education with our own actual collaborative practice. Various attempts include simultaneous obligatory classes of programming and art-expression in a semester, collaborative team projects for the mandatory final exhibition, and professors’ collaborative governmental, commercial and fine art projects. Those attempts have also been partly applied to the graduate programme that was established in 2004, and the graduate programme was selected as the Digital Media Division of Brain Korea 21 by Korean Ministry of Education in 2006, which supports the program for 7 years. The major issue of the suggested programme was the convergence of art and technology. In the panel, conventional barriers and their sensitive breakages for the convergence will be discussed.

11.00 Joonsung Yoon, Introduction to Educational Programs for the Convergence of Art and Technology in Korea

11.30 Dongho Kim, The Technologist’s View on the Convergence in Education and Practice

12.00 Keumsun Son, The Media Artist’s View on the Convergence in Education and Practice

Panel: New Media Art, New Economic Realities; Emergent Economic Structures in New Media Art, convened by Vicente Matallana

The aim of this panel is to analyze the economic structure of the new technologies art, from the practical point of view, in a rich understanding of the economy concept, based in the long term experience of LaAgencia and other invited organizations. Art’s traditional sector has been basically supported on goods interchange, the artwork for money. On the other side, the new technologies art sector has created or improvised an economic structure, more sophisticated, possibly more in agreement with the time. This structure comes from the media contemporarily and the work environment, the new technologies; and is conditioned and forced by the fact of not having a tangible object susceptible to be assimilated by the art market. The structure has evolved generating new practices and structures where the artist receives his/her return like fees for his/her work, awards, investigation grants or even orders where the border between artistic creation understood like fine arts, applied art and industrial creation is explored. This panel will review the evolution of the idea of economy on art, its development in the context of new technologies, going deep on the actual scenarios and the implication of research and industry on them. LaAgencia presents this panel.

14.00 Alex Adrianssen, The Economics of Unstable Media Art Practices

14.30 Joasia Krysa, The Rise and Fall / Boom and Bust / Profit and Debt of ‘New Media Art’ (Reflected in the Success of RMB City as Artwork and Developers Dream)

15.00 Domenico Quaranta, Not just a Means of Economy. Curating New Media Art in the Art Market Fiel

15.30 Sala Manca artist group, When a Margin Became a Centre: Old and New Media Art Practices in Jerusalem

Panel: Wearable Materialities, convened by Valerie Lamontagne

It is a panel grouping together individuals working in the field of wearables invested in exploring new material practices This panel investigates emerging material research in the field of wearables being explored by designers today. Exploring how ‘smart’ textiles converge with the disciplines of science, biology, fashion, engineering, architecture and data visualisation, the panel investigates the resonant potential for materialities to articulate new processes, interactions and iterations in the area of wearables design. As this hybridised area of creation calls upon the collaboration, inspiration and contribution from associated scientific and artistic disciplines the practice of wearable technologies is increasingly shaped and informed by these consonant fields of research. In the area of materiality, the uses of nonconventional materials, the role of sustainable energy practices, the design of responsive interfaces, as well as the engineering (or hacking) of technologies with the aims of creating new and innovative works will be investigated. The individuals invited to present on this panel will speak specifically to the topic of wearable materialities and their personal experience in designing hard/software applications and sensors/actuators for the articulation of new forms of textiles and fashion. Each of them is involved in innovative materials and platform development to create wearables.

11.00 Camille Parker, Ephemeral Touch: Bio-Sensing Devices and Skin Interfaces for Personal Engagement

11.30 Tara Baoth Mooney, Communicating and Cladding

12.00 Elena Corchero, Contemporary Design for Safety Textiles

14.00 Ebru Kurbak and Mahir M. Yavuz, Wearable Information: Information Visualization in Daily Wearables

14.30 Amanda Parkes, Digital Guilds: Collective Invention and the Practice of Wearables

15.00 Hannah Perner-Wilson, DIY Wearable Technology

Thursday, 27 August 2009

Creative Industries Forum

11.00 – 16.30 Contributors: Clive van Heerden, Moritz Waldemeyer, Mika ‘Lumi‘ Tuomola and guests

The Creative Industries Forum is a platform that brings together leading international experts in the field of digital content production and underpinning technology development. It offers a critical space for both formal debate and exchange, and informal networking with key sectoral stakeholders and creative professionals from Northern Ireland. The Creative Industries Forum will address crucial issues that have been identified in the Interim Strategic Action Plan commissioned by the Northern Ireland Department for Culture Art and Leisure as well as Invest NI’s Digital Content Strategy for the development of the creative industries sector in Northern Ireland. These wider policy issues include the discussion of an appropriate strategic growth of businesses in the sector for a region such as Northern Ireland, the effective development and utilisation of talent, knowledge and skills in the field and strategies for their internationalisation as well as the building of innovative partnerships. Workshops in the afternoon will deal in more detail with key concerns that have merged from the morning debates. The Creative Industries Forum is sponsored by Invest NI.

Panel: Emotion Research Forum, convened by Barbara Rauch

11.00 – 13.00 Contributors: Rachel Armstrong, Julie Freeman, Helen Sloan, Adinda van ‘t Klooster and Brigitta Zics

Without doubt emotions are evolving as they are influenced by culture, context and behaviour. David Matsumoto (2007) elucidates these three influences on human emotion. Western and Eastern societies have witnessed change with the use of new technologies. Will our ability to read emotional expressions slowly change with the new communication systems? Might people soon no longer be able to read facial expressions? With the loss of the ability to read an emotion might come too the loss of the experience itself? Steven Pinker (2002, p.40) stresses that emotions and behaviour always represent an ‘internal struggle’. It is not merely culture and society that directs human behaviour, but the mind has an innate system that generates endless possibilities to choose from. Emotions and feelings have been studied by some important researchers in the field, including Darwin, Damasio, LeDoux, and Ekman. The discussion can now be expanded to include emotion research and emotional responses in Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, gaming industries, virtual environment studies and augmented reality systems. This research forum brings together leading artists and researchers in the field of emotion studies. Researchers/artists and curators will debate artworks that primarily address emotions in humans. Medical doctor Rachel Armstrong will introduce her approach to the human body and its experiences through her understanding of material processes. She does not ascribe to the Cartesian mind/body split and considers human experiences to be firmly embedded in the physicality of flesh, without which the brain itself has nothing to ground it in any appreciation of ‘reality’. Consciousness and emotion, in her view, are embodied.

Curator Helen Sloan has a history of merging artists with scientists. She will discuss a recent project, ‘Chameleon’, a series of works that draw attention to emotional contagion, highlighting how we innately and continuously synchronize with the facial expressions, voices and postures of others by unconsciously infecting each other with our emotions. Three artists represented at ISEA 2009 will discuss in detail how their work addresses emotion studies. Julie Freeman, Brigitta Zics and Adinda van ‘t Klooster have been invited to present and open their work to the debate.

Panel: Urban Intersections – Panel discussion and presentation of interactive urban installations in contested virtual spaces, convened by Paul Sermon

This panel discussion and urban exhibition project brings together three multi-user virtual environment projects, developed by members of the Situations and Collaborations between Second Life and Consensual Landscapes and Scenarios project team at the University of Salford and Liverpool John Moores University, within a site-specific Second Life environment designed and constructed for presentation in Belfast at ISEA2009. The installation exhibition touches on a number of the conference themes, specifically ‘interactive storytelling and memory building in post-conflict society’ and ‘citizenship and contested spaces’. The facade of the of the Belfast Waterfront building has been identified as the proposed urban projection screen, which forms the central focus of the installation and immediately references the city of Belfast and its painted murals that depict the recent social history. The project could equally be projected onto the end of many of these rows of terraced houses. Each of the three projects presented will be housed in a Second Life space that represents the virtual exhibition of contested space. The projects will deal with ironies and stereotypes in multi-user virtual environments such as border control, cultural identity, gender roles, digital consumption and virtual desire. Each project will also utilise alternative interactive functionality and techniques that will allow the participants to interact and direct projects by their presence and movements in the space immediately in front of the projection screen.

If media art in the 1990s was characterized by interaction, an increasing use of public platforms in both urban and virtual contexts now positions media art work as an increasingly social and communicative act(ion). In this panel discussion the participating artists will investigate how the experience of tactility and physical experience makes both participants and the artists more vulnerable, yet also offers altered ways for generating affective experiences. This discourse will include the participants theoretical standpoint and creative practice such as Paul Sermon’s exposure of an identity paradox in Second Life, Charlotte Gould’s alternative aesthetic that questions the predominance of digital realism in multi user virtual environments and Peter Appleton’s exploration of poetic and gestural resonances which could contribute to the experience of emotion in virtual spaces.

This panel discussion and Second Life installation will reflect on the surroundings of Belfast and will draw inspiration from the local history and community. Reliant on both user interaction and input; the audience will form an integral part of this project that aims to transcend borders and boundaries of culture and gender as interactive storytelling and memory building in post-conflict society.

11.00 Paul Sermon, Peace Games

11.30 Peter Appleton, In the Gloaming, in the Gloaming

12.00 Charlotte Gould, Ludic Second Life Narrative

Panel: M.A.R.I.N. – Residency for the Irish Sea, convened by Tapio Mäkelä

M.A.R.I.N. – Media Art Research Interdisciplinary Network is a networked residency and research initiative, integrating artistic and scientific research on ecology of the marine and cultural ecosystems. For ISEA2009, continuing to AND Festival in Cumbria and Liverpool, we have built an 11-week Residency at the Irish Sea. In two consecutive panels we will discuss the concept of M.A.R.I.N. and two projects on board. In the first panel, Tapio Mäkelä discusses the overall concept of M.A.R.I.N. Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman address issues on Open data architecture and data commons around a project The Common Data Processing and Display Unit (CDPDU). In a second panel, Ecolocated – Littoral Lives will be addressed by Nigel Helyer, Daniel Woo, Andreas Siagian and Tapio Mäkelä.

11.00 Tapio Mäkelä, Location and Site in Artistic Science

11.30 Marko Peljhan, Open Data Architectures

12.00 Matthew Biederman, Data Practices and the Commons

Panel: Ecolocated. Environment, Sound and Engagement, convened by Tapio Mäkelä

14.00 – 16.30

Ecolocated – Littoral Lives combines ecological marine data with locative sound in an installation at the Catalyst Arts gallery as well as on a web based interface. Part of M.A.R.I.N. residency at the Irish Sea before and after ISEA2009, Ecolocated is an exploration of littoral zones near Belfast, areas where human impact on the marine ecology is strongest, and where local communities also experience the sea. It is this juncture, an experience of the sea as a historical or romantic imaginary, an every day environment for work and leisure, and a complex ecosystem that the term littoral bridges. Our ‘field’ or rather, sea bed recordings include environmental and meteorological data, interviews with scientists and local communities and sonifications. Part of the project is shaped through local workshops exploring marine ecology in the wider context of climate change. Our work can be followed on a geo tagged blog and pod casts.

Ecolocated is a collaboration between three artists, Tapio Mäkelä (FI), Nigel Helyer (AU) & Andreas Siagian (ID), in collaboration with the Audio Nomad software team, Daniel Woo (AU), and Michael Lake (AU). M.A.R.I.N. is an art and science residency initiated by Tapio Mäkelä and Marko Peljhan (SL/LV/USA).

Workshop: FLOSS+Art with pure:dyne, convened by Heather Corcoran and Rob Cannning

This short workshop will give participants a complete overview of the pure:dyne live multimedia GNU/Linux distribution, and discuss its context and community. This will include a whistlestop technical tour of the key applications including the audio and video editing applications Ardour and Cinelerra as well as tools such as Pure Data, Supercollider and integration with microcontrollers such as Arduino. Participants will learn how to make their own live bootable pure:dyne USB sticks and how to customize the distribution for their own specific needs. The workshop will also discuss who uses pure:dyne and who it is for - how artists, galleries, production centres, school departments and more are finding pure:dyne useful for making and teaching media art skills in a FLOSS environment.

About pure:dyne

pure:dyne is an operating system developed to provide media artists with a complete set of tools for realtime audio and video processing. pure:dyne is a live distribution, you don’t need to install anything. Simply boot your computer using the live CD and you’re ready to start using software such as Pure Data, Supercollider, Icecast, Csound, Fluxus, Processing, Arduino and much much more.

You can boot pure:dyne from usb stick, CD or DVD. All you have to do to get started is download pure:dyne, put it on your preferred medium and boot your computer. Without installing anything you’ll have the full system at your disposal, including all the software that comes with it.

pure:dyne is optimised for use in realtime audio and video processing. Both the system and the software are tuned especially for low latency and high responsiveness.

pure:dyne is based on Debian and Debian Multimedia. All packages provided by pure:dyne can be used if you are running these flavours of GNU/Linux.

pure:dyne is developed by artists, for artists. Our primary users are people like us – media artists who build all kinds of creative projects, using pure:dyne to do anything from recording and manipulating sound, making live visuals, creating interactive media in installations, and more. We use ‘artist’ as a broad term for anyone who is doing or wants to do something creative using their computer. https://devel.goto10.org/svn/puredyne/press/marks/GOTO10_logo.eps

Panel: Conspiracy Dwellings – Surveillance in Contemporary Art, convened by Pam Skelton

Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art is a forthcoming collection published by Cambridge Scholars in 2010. The collection brings together the essays of theorists and art practitioners about artworks made in the midst of conflict or from the position of commentary and critique. With the focus on surveillance and its impact on urban space, architecture, and citizenship this collection of essays helps us to understand the times we live in through art practices that consider the practical and theoretical status of surveillance from a variety of positions. In topics that span the 70’s to the present day the authors feature work made by artists from South Africa, the Federal Republic of Germany, the former German Democratic Republic, Northern Ireland, Poland and the United Kingdom.

Many of the artists whose works are considered in this collection have addressed lived experience dealing with complex issues such as resistance, positionality, censorship, control and state power, civic liberties, human rights and torture. Whilst others have commented on surveillance cameras in the midst of our cities or digital software for radical civilian and military technologies that promises in the near future to revolutionise invasive surveillance techniques. In contrast to these new technological advances traditional methods of surveillance and control may at first glance seem to be outdated yet they still have currency in our societies and are dismissed at our peril. While surveillance is an accepted form of mass observation in the shopping mall or the railway stations, we may ask where do we draw the line and how far does surveillance have to go before it worries us, and at what point is the citizen considered a threat to the state?

14.00 Outi Remes, An Introduction to the Project

14.30 Liam Kelly, Seeing You / Seeing Me: Art and the Disembodied Eye

15.00 Robert Knifton, CCTV in Two Liverpool Artworks

15.30 Paula Roush, Flat Screen, No Signal: Body and Location Under CCTV and the Pleasures of Webcamming

16.00 Pam Skelton, Konspirative Wohnungen // Conspiracy Dwellings

Workshop: Comob: Social and Environmental Mapping, led by Jen Southern and Chris Speed

14.00 - 16.00

Comob is an experiment in mapping environmental footprint and pollution through the spatial and social relationships between people in motion. Using the iPhone gps application ‘comob’ we will produce live, mobile visualisations of the movements and connections between people rather than each individual’s track. Using their ‘collective’ body to detect, describe and demarcate issues that are central to urban pollution, sustainability and community, groups will contribute to a collective mapping of subjective responses to the environmental characteristics of the city. By choosing to outline a space, or walk closer together and further apart in response to an urban system, participants will be simultaneously engaging in the discussion of both the subject matter and in the process of mapping it. The relationships between people and spaces elicits a variety of responses, including intimacy, irritation, and exhilaration. We are interested in an awareness of where other people are, and the negotiation of a sense of place between people. This workshop will look at how those relationships can be mapped, as live and moving visualisations, and in the playful uses of group mapping that emerge through practice on the ground.

Workshop: CRUMB Open Bliss, convened by Beryl Graham and Dominic Smith with guests

15.00 - 16.30 University of Ulster

Open Bliss is a series of workshops illuminating new media art and the practice of curating hosted by CRUMB, the online resource for curators of new media art (www.crumbweb.org). Each workshop responds to local contexts, venues and people, and brings them into an international network. CRUMB excels at creating informal, dialogical social settings for professional development, often involving a nice cup of tea. Using the Polytechnic Random Information Exchange ptechnic.org, this workshop will use online and object-based information exchange in order to document a range of knowledge concerning participative art project.

Friday, 28 August 2009

Workshop: Transformative Creativity with Fritzing, led by Brendan Howell

Fritzing is an open-source initiative to support designers and artists to take the step from physical prototyping to actual product. We have created the Fritzing software in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, creating a tool that allows the designer / artist / researcher / hobbyist to document their Arduino-based prototype and create a PCB (printed circuit board) layout for manufacturing. The complementing Fritzing website helps users to share and discuss drafts and experiences as well as to reduce manufacturing costs.

Fritzing is essentially an Electronic Design Automation software with a low entry barrier, suited for the needs of designers and artists. It uses the metaphor of the breadboard, so that it is easy to transfer a hardware sketch to the software. From there, it is possible to create a circuit foot print for turning the circuit into a PCB. The PCBs can be fabricated by the user or sent out to a manufacturer for production. Thus, the Fritzing process will leave the designer with a robust circuit, which they can use for permanent installation or even batch production of a project.

Fritzing challenges the conventional model of both electronics production and those who produce electronics by providing open source, intuitive electronic fabrication tools for non-engineers. We are eager to see what type of projects will result from our new tool and how the aesthetics of electronic design will change.

Roundtable: Was I Supposed to Feel like I was a Part of that? Strategies towards Engaged, Embodied Audiences in Participatory Electronic Artworks, convened by Helena Schniewind

14.00 - 16.30

A diverse range of artists and performers are harnessing electronic media and experimenting with what happens when recorded and live presence are placed side by side in a performance. When successful, electronic media performances of this type can activate an embodied exchange between audience members and the work, and develop the capacity of audience members to derive our own meaning instead of waiting for the artist’s intended message to be communicated to us through a screen. Once the exchange gets transposed into a setting where there are not only images to communicate meaning, but also live bodies and a rich sonic landscape, the question arises of what exactly the ‘screen’ is, and what part of the body is involved in ‘gazing’ at the work? Or, from an even more embodied position: what part of the body isn’t involved in ‘gazing’? Whose body are we talking about anyway?

Helena Schniewind will facilitate a round table discussion to consider how we, as electronic artists, have an opportunity to redefine our relationship with our audiences and open up what it means to be a participant in a work which involves electronic media. We will use our own practices as a launch point to deeply question whether contemporary ‘participatory’ works are actually open to a participatory audience and what shape that exchange might take. Who, or what, has been affected by the exchange? Was there really any exchange at all? Has the audience’s participation impacted the outcome of the piece in any way?

The round table will also present the opportunity to clarify what level of participation we actually want in our work. Some questions we might consider include: What are the different levels of participation? At what point does the participant feel satisfied with the exchange? At what point is the artist satisfied with it? And at what point does the participation actually transform the work? Helena is interested in how the use of electronic media in performance is changing the way audience members understand our role/position and experience our own bodies in relation to the work. Her research and performance-based work examines the ‘supportive’ bodies that make up a performance: technicians and audience members. She aims to create an alliance in her performances which prevents these critical members of a performance from entering panic mode when faced with the opportunity to participate in a less conventional way. This topic is immediate and relevant for artists working across all of the electronic arts, not just performance-based work.

Panel: prologue: Transitional Geographies / Feminist Mapping – led by Diana McCarty and Mare Tralla in cooperation with Kathy Rae Huffman and Reet Varblane

Golden Thread Gallery

11.00 – 1.00 Sign up for surgery

2.00 Discussion

The panel [prologue]: Transitional Geographies / Feminist Mapping explores the cultural and political impact of European enlargement on feminist art and discourse: feminist participation in the cultural, economic, technological and structural spheres of a changing Europe remains a challenge. This panel aims to map out the crucial issues of how and where feminism remains a radical innovator in art, technology and society and to make public contemporary feminist art and discourse. The panelists

- media artists, theorists and sociologists - are invited to reflect on the impact of shifting European borders and interests. This is extended to how feminist work addresses these changes. The huge paradigm shift of the late 80’s has had a huge impact on the notion of what it means to be European - and feminists have been active at each step. Current economic and political shifts constitute yet another huge paradigm shift and feminists are more engaged than ever. An interdisciplinary approach combines old and new media, sociological research, theory and art from a feminist perspective. Following a summer academy that brings the panel participants together with numerous artists, activists, critics and theorists to address the challenges presented by shifting geographic spaces and their real economic and political impact, the panel will focus on the status of a project to map feminist discourse and practice within (and without) European borders. As Action Research, the panel is derived from a series of [prologue]: New Feminism/New Europe events that will take place in Tallinn over 2009 and 2010 with the title prologue_EST, and past events in Berlin, Graz and Manchester.

ART ECONOMY POLICY

[prologue]: New Feminism/New Europe resulted from a series of formal and informal discussions about the need to reclaim the radical elements of feminist movement and to re-articulate a feminist perspective in terms of East and West Europe. Past Prologue events have focused on themes such as transgender, language of resistance, witty works, and open source software. Participants have been from Albania, Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland and the UK. By combining works once disregarded by historical blind spots and emerging artists, prologue has worked across borders, genres and generations. As such, Prologue refers to setting the stage for future action. An abundance of feminist art exhibitions across North America and Europe have affirmed the historical importance of feminist art, however, mainstream media art discussions still question the relevance of gender in art and media. [prologue]: Transitional Geographies / Feminist Mapping embraces the future: not only is feminist work valuable, it is more important than ever.

Workshop: CRUMB Open Bliss, convened by Verena Gfader, with guests

Linen Hall Library - 14.00 – 16.30

Open Bliss is a series of workshops illuminating new media art and the practice of curating hosted by CRUMB, the online resource for curators of new media art (www.crumbweb.org). Each workshop responds to local contexts, venues and people, and brings them into an international network. CRUMB excels at creating informal, dialogical social settings for professional development, often involving a nice cup of tea.

This workshop will involve a discussion of curating as working with/in ‘zones of disturbance’ (instead of working on zones of disturbance), and the outer and inner spaces of curating. Is curating always creating a ‘protective zone’? What about the equality of territories? A ‘daily paper’ will be produced at this event.

Saturday, 29 August 2009

Panel Posthumanism: Is the (Art) World Ready for Bioart?

9.15– 10.30 Chaired by Andy Miah, with Tagny Duff, Kathy Rae Huffman, Laura Sillars, Kerstin Mey and guests

prologue Surgery led by Kathy Rae Huffman and Reet Varblane in cooperation with Diana McCarty and Mare Tralla

Golden Thread Gallery

11.00 – 13.00

Panel: Dialogic Exchanges for Virtual Curation, convened by Dew Harrison

11.00 – 16.30

This panel presentation will consider, debate and reflect upon the exhibition ‘Kritical Works in SL II’ to be presented at ISEA2009, with respect to online and real-world curatorial practice. The particular focus for this panel will be on virtual worlds and the Second Life platform developed by Linden Labs when understood as a creative space for exhibition.

‘Kritical Works in SL II’ is to present works selected by an international panel of referees and will be shown both inWorld and in an Art Gallery environment. Building upon, and extending, phase one of the Kritical Works project, this new exhibition will continue to showcase artworks produced in, and for, Second Life and raises such questions as: How well does the ‘idea’ trans-locate across virtual and gallery spaces? To what extent does an inWorld exhibition anchor a virtual world into a physical environment? As phase two of the Kritical Works project, this exhibition will not only present the SL island artworks and trans-locate them into a real-world gallery space, it will also present the virtual artists invited, while documenting and recording the in World curatorial process itself. This peripheral but valuable data will then help to inform the interrogation of a new form of curation through panel discussion.

The panel will bring together experts in the fields concerning online/real-world curation and collaborative

practice, with artists developing creative projects in virtual world platforms.

11.00 Lizbeth Goodman, Creating Collaborative Spaces and Platforms (title t.b.c)

11.30 Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Second Life Sceptic

12.00 Kate Pryor, Whose Art World Is It anyway?

14.00 Paul Sermon, Liberate Your Avatar

14.30 Annabeth Robinson, An Artist’s Adventure in the Metaverse

15.00 Denise Doyle, Curating Kritical Works in Second Life

Panel: CoLab Panel – Performance and Interactive Technologies, convened by Deborah Lawler Dormer

14.00 – 16.30

CoLab is a newly established interdisciplinary creative technology centre built on a core partnership between AUT University, a public university and MIC Toi Rerehiko, a charitable arts trust. It aims to facilitate and promote creative practices, research and development, knowledge sharing, innovation and collaboration.

CoLab brings together arts organizations, practitioners, educational institutions, commercial enterprises, technology developers, industry bodies and communities. It supports the development and public dissemination of hybrid ideas, research and creative practices through converging technologies, innovative formats, modes and networks. In so doing, it forms a community of enquiry and a physical meeting-ground for creative expression, new media industries and trans-disciplinary educators.

CoLab is a core partnership research initiative between AUT University’s Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies which brings together Schools of Art & Design, Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Engineering and Communication Studies, and MIC Toi Rerehiko as New Zealand’s leading contemporary creative media and interdisciplinary arts centre. CoLab is working to build a strong social network of partners and associated organisations.

Key research strands include:

Interactive & Performance Technologies: engaging with responsive environments, audience interaction, pervasive, sensory and ambient computing, animatronics and virtual worlds.

Mobile, Spatial & Locative Media: focusing on social interaction with place and technology through the use of mobile devices, site-based systems and environmentally responsive installations.

Digital Storytelling and Community Media Practices: enabling diverse communities to access, develop and extend cultural and social dialogues through new media.

Visualisation: exploring modes of conceiving, organizing and representing information, knowledge and data structures, digital ontologies, collective intelligence and topological networks.

Realtime 3D: deploying graphical communications technologies and software applications for business, education and research, interactive web3D, rendering and real-time algorithms, complex virtual worlds for both real-time and offline domains.

Critical interfaces: interrogating the theoretical, philosophical, political and cultural implications of emerging technologies and forms of practice.

Cord: a networked group of researchers involved with and interested in graphic programming environments. It serves as a hub for development, dissemination and debate of issues and techniques related to interactive technologies and real-time audio and video manipulation.

Current CoLab projects will be discussed in depth in light of the hybrid model that is applied - moving across not-for-profit, academic and industry sectors as well as across multiple technology platforms.

14.00 Deborah Lawler Dormer, CoLab

14.30 Andrew Denton, Interactive and Performance Technologies – Horizon Line

15.00 Nigel Jamieson, Realtime 3D and Colourspace

15.30 James Charlton, Critical Interfaces – dForm and CoVolution

Leonardo Education Forum

@ ISEA2009, ARS Electronica 2009 and Re:live 2009

Organised by Nina Czegledy, Daniela Reimann and Lynn Hughes

13.45 – 16.45

Broad Goals of the Leonardo Education Forum

The Leonardo Education Forum, LEF, is a working branch of the ‘International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, San Francisco. Leonardo ISAST serves the international arts community by promoting and documenting work at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology, and by encouraging and stimulating interdisciplinary collaboration. http://www.leonardo.info/isast/isastinfo.html

The Leonardo Education Forum promotes the advancement of artistic research and academic scholarship serving practitioners, scholars, and students who are members of the Leonardo community; LEF provides a platform for collaboration and exchange with other scholarly communities. http://forum.lefnet.org/

Recent Initiatives

Currently, a LEF group is working on an international initiative to interrogate the gap between arts, science and technology in education, with a focus on questions such as: ‘Media Art Education in the 21st Century – what can be done? What are the most inspired educational goals for the 21st century?’

Initial focal areas were identified as:

• The role of Curricula: Mapping the terrain

• The role of Institutions: Institutional / Organizational Capacities and Benchmarks

• The role of Research in media art & science & technology

A culture of research orientation can be seen as a wider trend in the media arts. What kind of new art genres are being developed by artists’ creative use of mixed media technologies, visual culture and communities and what is their impact on education?

New curricula have to be developed, which inform new job profiles of artist researchers and new qualifications. Innovative forms of art practice are being introduced at the intersection of media, arts, science and technology. What are the most effective elements of curricula to educate artists as well as art teachers for the future?

The changing media and art institutions require an interactive debate on new conditions and evaluation criteria for developing new models for institutional networks, which allow implementing the media arts across curricula structures.

In January 2009 a short strategy summary, outlining focus issues and an action plan for a white paper on policy analysis and planning in media and new media education, was circulated. This was based on international meetings of experts and educators at Mutamorphosis, re:place ,

ISEA 2008 and ARS Electronica 2008. These meetings revealed that, although most of the sub questions in the identified focal areas overlap to one degree or another, there is also the need to add a discussion in the future of,

• network-centric and intercultural learning methods and processes.

The LEF@ARS09 education sessions continue this process of international consultation and aims to further the development of a trans-national approach to research, looking at innovative models for educating artists in the future.

Outcomes:

These meetings will provide the opportunity to summarize the participants’ input on the focus issues (by means of working groups) and to identify a Steering Committee with leaders for each of the focal areas (which may be modified in the course of the discussions). After the meeting(s), the steering group will, among other things, lead the development, via email forum discussions, of longer papers containing strategic recommendations on policy analysis and planning in media art education in each of the focal areas. These recommendations are intended to outline a vision of education transformed by the context of new learning cultures, rather than one that relies on tweaking traditional models of pedagogy. This material will then be edited into one document intended for stakeholders in the field (practitioners, educators, researchers, theoreticians, historians, etc, as well as administrators and policymakers). The text will also be submitted to the Leonardo Journal of the International Society of Art, Sciences and Technology.

Workshop: CRUMB Open Bliss, convened by Sarah Cook and AxelLapp,with guests

Golden Thread Gallery

15.00 – 16.30

Open Bliss is a series of workshops illuminating new media art and the practice of curating hosted by CRUMB, the online resource for curators of new media art (www.crumbweb.org). Each workshop responds to local contexts, venues and people, and brings them into an international network. CRUMB excels at creating informal, dialogical social settings for professional development, often involving a nice cup of tea.

This workshop will take the form of a conversation between practicing curators, bringing together contemporary art and new media art concerning local, site-specific and global, networked practices.