house sparrow

the sparrow has moved house

2010-01-26T23:47:00.002+13:00

I'm all in one place now.
find me over here...
su

discovered

2009-11-01T16:22:00.000+13:00

Today I found a mutant stem of wisteria growing outside my office. It reminded me that I need to get back to the Steichen essay. Thanks to Max Bellamy for the photos.

Unseen

2009-10-29T13:08:00.003+13:00

Yesterday David Green I hosted the *Illustrating the Unseeable: Reconnecting Art and Science* Symposium here at the School of Art. The initial impetus for the event was a desire to find out what was happening in Dunedin in the fields of art/science collaboration. We scheduled 18 short presentations into the day in an attempt to make the synergies appear in the spaces inbetween. The day was full, challenging and consistently engaging. The level of research was fantastic and the connections formed were dynamic and definitely ongoing. I was unable to do my usual 'live blog' of the event as the multiple hats of hostess and chair were enough, and it was wonderful to immerse myself in the flow of ideas. So today I'm still processing. Here are few (very personal) impressions.

The day began with Phil Ker the COE of Otago Polytechnic talking about the importance of applied research in Polytechnics. Adopting a clear political stance, Phil commented on the continual erosion of the funding for tertiary environments, and the importance of events that actually side-stepped the funders and returned us to core values.
I then presented an introduction where I framed my own thoughts about art and electronic media by connecting Lorraine Daston's work on curiosity and wonder with the histories of media arts via a discussion of frequency, resonance, method, sense and knowledge. I strung together a series of examples that for me operated at this edge of wonder, both scientific and artistic. Our poster image was David Haines and Joyce Hinterding's EarthStar (image above) and I located this as a central work where experimental method is key, and where there is an opening up of visuality to other senses. http://www.sunvalleyresearch.net/?p=340
I ended my presentation with this statement from Lorraine Daston:
“The idea of representation [is] being thrown overboard because to visualise something is the same act as making the object itself. It no longer makes sense to talk about a nature which we then try more or less faithfully to represent. It only makes sense to talk about the creation of an object to manufacture for the very act of visualising it.”
and this work by semiconductor: http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/Magnetic_Movie/Magnetic.htm

We then moved onto our first set of short presentations.

(photos of presenters by Max Bellamy)

unseen: art-science-analogy

2009-10-29T13:07:00.002+13:00

I had grouped the first four speakers through the rubric of "culture".
Geoff Wyvill from Computer Science at the the University of Otago presented a picture of words and language. Beginning from the premise that 'we' are not very good at speaking to each other, and highlighting the impossibilities of some language when it attempts to be precise, he made the observation that artists and scientists need to be clear, consise and direct in their language. He used some examples of Picasso's paintings and described the manner in which Picasso allowed us to see around a figure, to use multiple cameras (as it were). The suggestion was that although we want to be able to bend light and see from outside a singular body, our langauge still has to retain a simplicity if we are to communicate.

Bridie Lonie from Art Theory at the School of Art demonstrated that language itself is very specific and particular and can contribute its own thought and method to the obects of sight. Framing her discussion with three words: representation, deployment and participation, Bridie constructed a specific kind of narrative from Hans Holbein to Steve Kurtz http://www.caedefensefund.org/ and CAE (yes, in under 10mins) where the tools of observation and perception were shown to be integral to both science and art. Bridie's talk served to re-knit science and art via language, as if the disciplinary boundaries of the previous 300 years were merely a structural anomoly.

Mike Paulin from the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago http://www.otago.ac.nz/neurozoo/ introduced me to the world of Evolutionary Perception. Mike's work with dogfish has contributed major shifts in our understanding of perception but also in the very structuring of the world. Using complex visualisation tools Mike demonstrated that sharks *know* where they are on the planet at any one time by using magnetic feedback to identify their latitude. Mike has been able to date the perceptive ecology of early evolotion to the precise (give or take a millenia) date when perception evolved: seeweed that 'chooses' its rock.

Peter Stupples from Art Theory at the School of Art followed with a very tightly woven discussion of art and neuroscience. What is central to Peter's work is the way it uses knowledge of neuroscience to redress anomolies and assumptions in art history. This is really important, as art history itself as a discipline needs to be opened up to a cross-displinarity. Using research by Antonio Damasio http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/bci/faculty1008328.html and Barbara Maria Stafford http://barbaramariastafford.com/ as his building blocks, Peter showed that an artist is not simply 'influenced' by exposure to (in this case) a piece of Maori carving, but that multiple and complex situational and perceptive influences are at play. It is no longer a game of drawing direct lines. I was reminded of some of Bruno Latour's early work where science is opened up to critique as a 'discipline'.

unseen: collaboration and knowledge

2009-10-29T13:05:00.043+13:00

The second grouping of speakers focused on the knowledges that can be gained through collaboration.
Felicity Molloy, currently teaching in Massage Therapy at Otago Polyetchnic, gave a performative discussion of an early project conducted at Unitec. SpaceMaking involved groups of students from dance and architecture in the generation of reflexive collaborative works that in the process intruduced new frameworks to each other's disciplines. The openness to different forms of practice and different ways of knowing was obvious in the stunning images of dancers entwinned in architectural 'muscles.' Felicity also introduced the potential for somatic ways of knowing, where knowledge is more than skin-deep.

Artist Claire Beynon demonstrated that intensity with which collaboration can generate new thought. Working closely with scientist Sam Bowen, Claire has developed forms of tacet knowledge that go beyond what either discipline can contribute alone. Dealing predominantly with aesthetic surfaces drawn from her experiences at Antarctica, Claire took us on a journey through working methods that showed the art object slipping and sliding between multiple plates. This was also a deeply scientific process where wonder dominated certain processes and miniature creatures were found to behave aesthetically, selecting one red stone to finish their constructions.

Julian Priest ostensibly presented a report from Riga. Tracing the history of the international festival for new media culture symposia at rixc http://www.rixc.lv/ he articulated a key understanding for the day: that the methods of art and science that we were discussing were not science journalism. That form of objective distance and study is not the creation and generation of new thought or new ways of knowing and doing. Drawing on his history as a network activist, and the kinds of collaboration that he ends up conducting between the two halves of himself, Julian ended with a discussion of energy. Thinking through the operations of energy as not just force, but a movement where the transference is not always uni-directional Julian argued that tactics are essential to constructing different ways of knowing.

unseen: building blocks - genesis

2009-10-29T13:04:00.001+13:00

During lunch Amos Mann performed "ring", a silent performance that connected the magic of illusion with the concentration of experiment. Using the basic tools of newspaper and glue stick Amos turned moebus strips into fluid flexible and unpredictable shapes. (two circles make a square!)
Mike Paulin also used the lunch break to demonstrate another form of magic: robots formed from a toothbrush and cellphone. Dancing their miniature way across the floor the robots gave a literal meaning to the notion of animation.

The next group of presentors engaged the process of making. Dunedin artist Nicola Gibbons discussed her painting practice and the influences of health and medicine on the formal aspects of the surface she creates. Her works oscillate between the marco and micro, cells could be the mooon; the surface of jupiter could be blood within a kidney. Nicola's work suggested that abstraction is a way of knowing. Nicola also introduced the connections she has been making with the Otago Science Festival.

Andrew Last from Jewellery at the School of Art, talked through the complex process of a commission for Octa associates. Initially a direct relationships between on screen imaging and off screen moulding seemed straightforward. After pouring over eleven moulds for a silver 'goblet' based on the digital design, two have been successful. In unpacking the process Andrew highlighted the role that materiality actively plays in the generative process of form. It was a reminder for me that digital materiality holds its own characteristics that do not always translate.

Stu Smith from ARL (Animation Research Limited) was similarly translating ideas from a commercial brief into a visual form. Working on a brief for added information visuals for television coverage of Formula One races, Stu has been attempting to make visual the sensation and feel of the race car. This initially took the form of mapping the G-forces as the car went round and round and round the digital track I couldn't help but feel the forces of movement, however the arrows telling me of it seemed unconvincing. When Stu re-worked the brief to focus on accelleration and braking suddenly the image came to life. Red and green are such clear indicators of momentum, and together with the speeding car visual sensation translated into felt and experienced momentum.

http://www.tonmo.com/gallery/files/1/pb-teuthowenia-frontal-med.jpg
Peter Batson from Deep Ocean Quest Productions has the tools to visualise things that cannot be seen, and that have only been experienced by a very few. Using some of the world's most sophisticated deep sea devices Peter is capturing footage of creatures that maybe mimic those of our imagination, or at least occupy the worlds of Jules Verne. Peter presented some maps of the earth that shifted the idea of a blue planet to that of a black planet where ability to see is limited to our terrestial existence. Although google earth gives us the illusion that there is nothing left to explore, Peter showed that we can only see the thinnest slice of the universe.

Chris Ebbert from Design at Otago Polytechnic showed that computer programmes do not always beahve predicitabily, and demonstrated his explorations of car modelling that involve letting the computer take over some of the 'decision-making' processes. By accepting the conclusions that the computer has come to, Chris showed that the process of making sense is not only a human characteristic. His dream is to generate virtual cars that may be available for purchase in virtual environments such as Second Life.

unseen: object and perception

2009-10-29T13:00:00.001+13:00

The final session for the day returned us to the tactics of perception.
Alistair Regan from Design at Otago Polytechnic presented some of his early works conducted in Sweden where the control rooms of large industrial environments were revisited in order to make them more sensory. Alistair focused on the multiple inputs that a person employs as they recieve, process, and react to information. The experience highlighted the role of the peripheral in understanding. The sonic environment of an industrial workplace was found to be as important as the data filled screen. Important in Alistair's work is a shifting of the notion of feedback from a one-to-one correspondence. Through the design process feedback was found to be multi-sensory and locative.

Pete Gorman from the Dunedin School of Art presented some of his early research into the sonification of geological matter. Begining with the pseudo-scientific discovery that he could insert two metal rods into the ground and locate the hum of electrical mains, Pete is now working towards the sonification of rocks through a kind of activiation of their 'voice'. This is not about anthropomorphising the rocks though, Pete is searching for a way to engage the tacet knowledge of an form of engaged ecology.

Medical Practicioner Paul Trotman presented some clips from his TV film "donated to science" that explores the kinds of boundaries that may or may not be crossed when engaging with death. The film follows two people who have donated their body to science, firstly by interviewing them about their decision, and them by interviewing medical students who are engaging in two years of dissection. The film ends with the students viewing the initial interviews. This is a deeply complex film and the differeing emotions are clear in the shifting perceptions of the medical students. The film will screen on TV later this month. http://www.realscreen.com/screeningroom/20090930/donated2science.html

Karsten Schneider from Natural History New Zealand is also working amidst the rules and constructions of television production. Karsten told a story of his own realisation that television was a productive and compelling medium for expression in its own right. Working with zoological studies in eco-location Karsten then developed a practice in 3D animation that pushes at the boundaries of what exactly natural history can be. He showed extracts from Dark Days in Monkey City http://animal.discovery.com/tv/dark-days-monkey-city/ a series that shifts our understandings of both documentary and representation by employing strong fictional elements to attempt to tell a 'true' story.

Mark McGuire from Design Studies at the University of Otago introduced three projects that engage the politics of visuality. Core to these works is the information that visual things can give us that is just not possible by any other means. Nele Azevedo's Melting Man project is an eloquent installation that does not *tell* us about climate change but shows it through ice and heat. Similarly Eve Mosher's High Waterline Project invoves a simple line, a marker that cuts through communities and records wet and dry. Mark highlighted that these works are not illustration, but actually events that trip associations, works that make us think by thinking themselves.

The final plenary wass chaired by Marcus Turner from Natural History New Zealand. David and I had asked Marcus to try to track the day and draw from it a series of threads. Marcus talked us through all the presentations pulling out the core idea about method and experimentation: that a testtube does not equate with scence. This was an important reminder of the sometimes too easy conflation of technology with science, and a need for clarity and specifity with not only our tools but also with the way we discuss them.

Leoni Schmidt the Head of the Dunedin School of Art closed the conference by reintroducing the notion of eco-location as a method for connectivity. By sending messages out into space networks can be bought into being, and interactions can occur.

Utopias ~ how to dream them? How to build them? | Pool

2009-10-21T20:17:00.005+13:00

Utopias ~ how to dream them? How to build them? | Pool

Although this link/title is to Nigel Heyller's new project, the title resonated with a day I just spent up at the University of Otago listening to presentations about eResearch. yup. Electronic research is something new, big, fast and its coming our way! It means we will be able to collaborate in ways only hiterto imagined, huge scale multi-media lectures will occur, (PhD's may even include images) research will become open, and we, well, we will share stuff. What was so disturbingly utopian about the vison presented was not only that the day felt it had already passed, but that the very subject of study was never engaged. What exactly are we going to do with these "fat pipes" that can now access the multi-power of supercomputers? Here the by-line becomes important - how to dream them? how to build them?
I went along to the eResearch day because Zita has sugested that we potentially access the KAREN network to form our contribution ot the electrosmog festival next March. And yes KAREN is there; it is fast, and currently only 0.2% of it is being used. The faciliators (the company who own KAREN) REANNZ want us to use it, but can't quite come up with 'how'. The scientists are doing a good job. KAREN allows people to share vast amounts of data, they can run simulations, the earth can shake in real time as models are trialled. The same goes for the historians, eResaerch allows them to share vast databases of information. The realisation dawned on me ... science and history can share the supercomputer because they both deal with data. But where does this leave the data-light disciplines of art? Do we have any need for supercomputing and access to vast bandwidth? And what if the very topics we want to study themselves are digital? Do we feed the digital data down the digital data tube? and what does it look like when it comes out the other end?
Science in this model is about sight. If we can see it we will understand more. If we can grasp at a data-set from over here and mix it with one from over there, we will be able to see something new. The visualisations proved the point. The historians shared the same approach. If we can overlay the demographic information of pre-revolutionary Paris with a database of music and images, we will know something we didn't previously.
The problem comes in the generation of the data, and the reliance on repeatability. Data is not static unless we make it be. Data is always selective, as are our methods. This vast coming together of resources and information (which is not the same as data) means that the way knowledge is constructed is changing. And this was certianly acknowledged. But what was not acknowledged was that our methods need to change too. Images are not simply there to illustrate. Images contribute knowledge. They are not there to be picked apart for historical fact, they are there because an artist has made a particular series of decisions about how best to do what it is they do - visually. And more often than not has streatched the 'truth' along the way.
eResearch in the academy does not yet seem to engage digital materials as materials for study, but as material sthrough which study occurs.
There is something that art (and more particularly the methods of art history) can contribute to this vision, and it is a wealth of content and analysis that say don't trust the utopian agenda, epecially when it is driven by a technology based on scale.

KAREN network: http://www.karen.net.nz/home/
eResearch: http://extreme.otago.ac.nz/ocs/index.php/eResearch/er09
history and networked digital media: http://southseas.nla.gov.au/

testing and erratic errors

2009-08-24T22:16:00.004+12:00

I'm just starting work on my book chapter for Mark Nune's "Error" project, and really enjoying re-reading the texts from the m/c issue.

'error' Volume 10 Issue 5 Oct. 2007. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/journal/past_vol_10.php

It is also really nice to be rethinking et al.'s pieces and wondering about how they anticipate so many of the things I want to write about now. Walter Benjamin has popped his head up and is whispering in my ear about testing. I tried to think this through in some work around digital materiality and now realise it should have been done here in relation to discussions of noise and information not there. Benjamin argues that without testing (a form of experimental method) cameras really would have not changed, and the concept of the masses would not have quite emerged in the form it did. I'm thinking about this as I read the latest Cabinet (do these really just get better and better? http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/34/index.php) about "testing" and realising that the test is the ultimate encapsulation of error and that the APU in the fundamental practice (et al. Venice 2005) http://www.etal.name/index.php?/ongoing/the-fundamental-practice/ are themselves a form of test. They test us as viewers but they also test the boundaries of the space, and the operations that can and can't occur within them. In the Cabinet are the usual suspects: phrenology, ink blots, monkeys, spcae travel, and cats, but also an article on Conlon Nancarrow a composer who labouriously re-worked player piano rolls. And it is Nancarrow's approach to experimentation that excites me as a way into my piece on et al. noise error and information. Dolven writes in the article "Nancarrow offers an occasion for thinking about why you would ever want to sound like a machine. Machines, after all, are mostly built to imitate us, right? What are we up to when we try to imitate them back?" I think that what we are up to is thinking through the processes of information as a structure rather than as a form of communication. It is in this structure that Nancarrow finds his method of scoring and replaying the pianolo roll and that et al. embrace as the APU simultaneously engage and repulse our attentions. In Cabinet Williams describes Nancarrow's work : "If you don't listen, you are lost, and if you listen too much, you are lost as well, so it's a very strenuous state of mind."(p.50). Once in an exam room, I found the sonic space of the room begin to take over my thoughts so much that after an hour I was fully attuned all the bodies, all the sounds, all the movements both inside and out. I was receptive, yet error ridden. I had made the wrong choice by paying attention to sound. It goes without saying that I did not do well in the exam. Testing in this sense becomes about pushing at the boundaries of listening and not listening enough especially in our engagements with technologies. I've also just come home after a lecture by Simon Ingram about his painting machines. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d_Cmuoh1aU And I was struck by the need to continue to discuss these works within the discources of painting. Of course this should not be abandoned, and I wanted to ask, lets think more about the machine. In Deleuze and Gauttari's machinic sense, is not every painting made by a painting machine? The creature that paints is no more mystical to me than the robot that completes instructions. More subjective, less subjective...All these paintings (which I do really love) are instructional projects. Sets of questions, problems to be solved, tests for either the human who paints or the robot who paints. It is no surprise then that one begins to imitate the other. Dolven again: "Do we become more mechanical at the point of our intersection with a machine?" (p.52). The structures of information encompass those of noise, yet we continue to hold onto this idea of a pure space where we can understand what each other mean. We can't really do this without testing, checking, confirming, questioning, and here error comes into its own....But you said ... no I said... but what I meant was... wern't you listening?...

list processing from june

2009-08-11T09:26:00.005+12:00

I've been scanning through a few months of empyre listings, http://www.subtle.net/empyre that all seem somehow relevant to what I am thinking at the moment but in an uncertain way. So bear with me as i think through some things here. As I read copy and paste the things that stick I wonder about the very act of copying. Just watched RIP! a remix manifesto last night and there is something inportant in here. I'm not doing well at crediting properly these fragments of discussion, they are of course all available on the empyre list archives, they can be traced. So in terms of citation that is ok. I feel a tempered responsibility to credit the voices here too. Although maybe not it is an overhead conversation anyway. Something that has happened in the halls outside. And this is my reading rather than their writing after all.
Presence and trace must connect into the discussion of relational aesthetics. What types of relationships are being formed? To what ends? Are all relationships good? And where is the power? If the relationship is formed through conversation then there is an equal play, but who prepared the field., or established the ground rules? someone has to. It is the conversation that can become truly generative.

Nick Knouf writes about John Law who describes how, "Method, then, unavoidably produces not only truths and non-truths, realities and non-realities, presences and absences, but also arrangements with political implications. It crafts arrangements
and gatherings of things---and accounts of the arrangements of things---that could have been otherwise" (_After Method_, 143).

There is The FLOSS+Art book
(http://goto10.org/flossart/, available from the Pirate Bay:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4671426/FLOSS_Art_v1.1);
We in western cultures tend to think primarily of
objects as commodities but they are of course also generators of
relationships.

Knouf talks about Michel Serres' quasi-object as the ball that holds everyone in place in the soccer game. I'm thinking that in some way Zidane himself becomes that quasi-object in Parreno's film. This can be extended into Bruno Latour's - work we have never been modern. Some of the material I was reading last week about ecology made a similar argument: that it is in the separation of nature from culture that we are able to not care. If this is actually an impossible task then yes we must engage we must do something. There is no impenetrable dividing line. the link to Latour's text is here. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LATWEH.html

And then indeterminancy appears amidst the discussion. Nathan and I are scratching around a project on indeterminancy. and it has grown out of nathan's work with graphic scores and my ongoing trouble with noise. The score is a most inexact reproduction, it is an impossible tool. But the invention of other systems is no more exact and involves the same ability to translate the language: i can't read stockhausen - http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~grace/220c/Kontakte_1.jpg. I will need to follow up on Simon Yuill's text as I absolutely agree notation is not the solution, and changing graphic style does not change the problematic of performance/ reproduction and improvisation. http://www.metamute.org/en/All-Problems-of-Notation-Will-be-Solved-by-the-Masses
http://www.artandculture.com/feature/631

Sean Cubitt appears asking: "what might a digital resistance look like?": "The question is how do we operate now: Tactically? Strategically? And how do we minimise or at least delay the assimilation of whatever we invent into the reproduction of
capital?"

There are two potential answers posted by Caludia Costa Pederson: 1. Wafaa Bilil and his use of multiple platforms and 2. PUKAR collective and their gendered strategies for loitering videogame installation.

Both engage the structures of capital without buying it, and I think it is important to engage.

fly away home

2009-08-06T14:18:00.006+12:00

So, I've moved house a little. I'll leave housesparrow here, but she is now living a duplicate life over on wordpress as ladybird one space for thought one space for collection.. follow the link http://suballard.wordpress.com

fear of a networked planet

2009-07-28T15:23:00.005+12:00

Everything is ready to go. I'm going to upload the keynote presentation as a movie here... without sound.

But there is a larger spectre haunting this project ... the network itself. How reliable can a network not be? What are the provisional plans for total network failure? It seems that the handy control-command-4 (eg. screen grab) key command may be my only solution.
However I need to more carefully anticipate life in offline spaces... so tonight I will think through how to turn an online portfolio into an offline one (just in case).

moving house and sharing widely

2009-06-09T09:40:00.004+12:00

Things have been a bit quiet here as I work up an online presence over on wordpress.
It will be ready soon, but first I want to work out how to embedd some sample teaching materials, as well as thinking about the share, share widely resarch projects by Trebor Scholz. I'm beginning to make a connection between this project for the GCTLT and the SHrUB research project I have been doing with Rachel Gillies and Pam McKinley. (Well, they have been doing it all really, but I have been watching very closely.) Anyway my contributions for today also come via Trudy Lane, as Trudy and I are co-chairing the first LEF Aotearoa (Leonardo Education Forum) fourm at the ADA conference in a few weeks so there are some really nice convergences happening here. http://symposium09.aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/

Share, share widely – Trebor Scholz & Tom Leonhardt

Started in 2004, sharewidely is an application of The Distributed Learning Project in the field of new media research. The tool enables open knowledge exchange in new media research and production. Individuals as well as groups of researchers and self-learners can create, share, edit, find, and re-use content related to media art. The project is for all who are engaged in media art and theory. more ...

http://www.sharewidely.org/

Thoughtmesh – Jon Ippolito

ThoughtMesh generates tags to connect scholarly essays published on different Web sites.

http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/

What I like about both these initiatives is that they are coming from teachers, and practitioners of digital media. So they are coming from those who are engaged daily with students. But more significantly these projects are driven by a philosophy that is critical about the tools/ softwares and hardwares that we engage everyday. The ubiquitous nature of media processes must be acknowledged in any engagement with these materials. It is this directness and commitment unpredictability that I want to capture in whatever system I engage with in these networked forums. I am suspicious of any quick fix or single solution. Even open source solutions come with their own politics.

structuring the sphere

2009-05-06T09:54:00.003+12:00

I've been working on drafts for the presentation, the short outline is here.
I'll work on each section over the next week.

a concept of experience - engaging the trash.

2009-04-23T22:23:00.009+12:00

For the duration of this project I have been searching for a way to explicitly connect my existing knowledge base or contexts with ones that in many ways are less explicitly familiar to me. Or to put it a different way I've been wanting to connect the depth of critical and cultural theory that I engage every day with the educational theory that I practice but have not always obediently read. I have not wanted to do this in a facicoius or superficial way. This evening I read an article that has finally given me a set of tools to move more confidently within educational theory.

Yasuo Imai, "Walter Benjamin and John Dewey: The Structure of Difference Between Their Thoughts on Education" The Journal of the Philosohpy of Education, vol 37, no.1, 2003. 109-125.

In this beautifully written article Imai unpacks in parallel the educational thought of Dewey and Benjamin and demonstrates how central to both is firstly an understanding of the concept of experience and secondly the application of a concept of media to the classroom environment. Imai begins by highlighting the differences between the two thinkers but it is in the second half of the article where notions of experience and aesthetics are played out that I can find a historical location for my own understandings. I'm gong to summarise and paraphrase badly here, but as this blog is a tool for me to record my late night thinking, I reckon that's ok.

In "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" (1917) Dewey writes of experience as interaction. This is because he is making an argument against a dualistic understanding of reality in which dreams and madness are separate to the real cognitive world. All are experiences, and "experiencing is just certain modes of interaction"(Dewey cited in Imai 111). "What we experience is what the world can be." (Imai 111) Dewey does not say that there is no such thing as objectivity and subjectivity but that experience and interaction come first.

Benjamin's philosohpical disagreements were with the broader issues of Kantian aesthetics but also with the problems of technological determinism that saw the artwork separated from its means of production, and thus from any auratic content. In "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" he writes about how everyday the urge grows stronger to grasp the image by means of its likeless. We want the to come closer to us, we want to posess it, it is no longer framed and distant, of course this is the fault of cinema and photography, NOT for Benjamin a bad thing. The decay of the aura allowed all sorts of things to occur ... workers could be mobilised by the movies, distraction allowed them time out from their jobs and the ablilty to be able to think. (Ok I'm summarising really badly here). Cultural context is not about subject or object but also about interaction. (Imai 112)

The surprise for me is in the closeness of Dewey's argument about the means of production. Dewey says that the worker has been reduced to hands, they no longer have an aesthetic relationship with the objects they produce. He argues there needs to be a close combination of action and reception in order for there to be an integrated end. Integrated ends and means for Dewey equals aesthetics.

The difference between the two is equally important. Dewey wants to criticise and modify everyday experience based on his understanding of the integrated aesthetic experience. (Imai 115). Benjamin on the other had sought a change in the very nature of this aesthetic experience ... and central to that change was his concept of media.
(we are getting to the classroom really soon).

Imai gives the example of "children finding secrets in everyday trash." Their experience leads them to connect their find to the activity of play. Benjamin "denouncesd the kind of education that is geared to predetermined goals. ... The conception of education that Benjamin offers in contrast is of a space where children can unfold and develop through mimetic activities and improvisation, without being restricted by such restrictive linear methods [that predetermine outcomes or goals]" (Imai 116).

This rings true for me, and then Imai goes a step further in his analysis "When a child's mimetic activities unfold in such a space, the material of the activities - trash, for example - is a medium of activities." (Imai 117). Benjamin has written how a meduim communicates in itself ... this has been taken in all sorts of deterministic directions by theorists like McLuhan, and even contributed to the debates around remediation. But what interests me here is that Imai shows how Dewey also develops a notion of media that is based in materiality. "Media are themselves something material through which immaterial contents are communicated" (Imai 117). I don't actually agree here that the contents are immaterial, but would say that they are a different kind of materiality.

However, the implications of this understanding of media are that if we understand educational materials in terms of methods and ignore the media or the materials we separate the contents from the communication ... that is the "materials appear as mere means through which children should be led to the 'idea'." (Imai 118). However in searching through the trash..."the material itself emerges as the contents of perception or the substance of activities, namely as media." (Imai 118). To put it extremely simplistically, teaching materials are a media not a content. The trash is not engaging because of its content but because of what it might become, of its mediality. By including this notion of media within the classroom environment a sphere is created which is improvisational, and that relies on the experience of those who inhabit it. It is the classroom understood as a sphere of experience.

"The legitimate content of instruction in Dewey's view is constructed from the learner's activities and actions activated by the motivating power of the teaching material, not from teaching material that exists in its own right and has inherent significance independently of the learner." (Imai 120) . Dewey thus defines education as the reconstruction of experience. It is interaction. "The process of interaction is merged into a process of experience"(Imai 120) Further more this experience is aesthetic. "Art works as media are to aesthetic experience what teaching material as a medium is to educational experience" (Imai 121)

Imai goes deeper into the analysis of this relationship between Dewey and Benjamin, but for my purposes it is this idea of media within a sphere of experience that is cricual. As media change so too do the experiences, and the learning environment.

In the senior electronic arts lab we engage the trash everyday.

unrelational things

2009-04-22T12:11:00.004+12:00

Or how many web 2.0 applications can I have operating at once ... and WHY.
Everyday I post out 3 events that are happening internationally in the field of media arts to my senior students. (I call it my global electronic spam). I do this on a group email list. And I often save the posts to my folder called "interesting things." I go back into them, I follow the links, I compile resasrch materials, I teach directly from these resources.
BUT
Now I've joined facebook. And I started to think maybe these resources would be better there ... is it a better research aggrogator? I'm addicted to delicious, and wonder if in the comments / notes function there are the tools I need. But these things still come at me in email.
And there are other lovely tools out there. But are the tools the answer?
They are somewhat unrelated to the material, but I guess also central to it.
more thinking needs to be done here.
su

power to the point or key to the note

2009-04-17T11:15:00.002+12:00

I have started formatting a series of keynote slides and realising that it is possible to miss a lot out.

"Nothing exists independently. Not a single molecule, not a thought."
Anne Michaels The Winter Vault Bloomsbury, 2009, p.74

Still problematic for me is how to integrate the established voices in educational theory. I'm reluctant to go to a beginners guide, or wikipedia.

On youtube is a fantastic video of Gilles Deleuze teaching at Vincennes in 1980. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ndNVjS0svI It shows a classroom in action. There is little eye contact, the students are obviously using their EARS, they are listening. Deleuze barely takes a breath. He is in the middle of the room, students are close and intimate.
What is truely fantastic is that most of the students have tape recorders (and cigarettes). They are recording the class. New Media are not so new.

outlining

2009-04-16T15:26:00.002+12:00

Ok now trying to get 'concrete' with this.
I have decided that the best way to preent to the panel is to host it as a conversation. This connects also to the work I'm doing at the moment with ADA as we head towards the materiality and criticality symposium in June.
So how to host a converation? I'm reading an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, he has hosted some fantastic conversations, released as books but also conducted live at conferences. there is a crafted casualness to his questioning approach that shifts the discussion away form an intereview and more into the realm of conversation. In this context I am both the host of the conversationa dn the interviewee. Need to think about:
- scale
- relevance
- clarity

The best way to do this may be to design the hour and a half in concentric circles ... the lab ... histories ... futures ... networks ... .
This allows a series of stopping points and overlaps.
This can develop into a series of headings and inside these a grouping of ideas.
This also allows me to integrate theoretical approaches within the groupings.
A first attempt:

1. undergraduate history - women'sstudies - haraway - situated knowledges - positionality
2. current networks - collaborative research - massumi - newmobilities - workshop - equality - curriculum development - the lab
3. flexibility - research/ teaching interface - delicious - communities of learning - MFA supervision
4. electronic arts - academic leadership - principles - criticality - assertiveness - assessment
5. improvisation - making and doing - theory and practice - multiplicity - blogging - media ecologies
Each of these groupings represent a pathway that begins with a situation / location and moves towards the realisation of a particular strand of my practice.

Next I'll expand each of these and think through how they will mobilise my presentation.

what is a network anyway?

2009-04-08T20:59:00.002+12:00

Two things going on today that are related to this process of preparing a presentation on my teaching / pedagogy. Rachel and I had a preliminary meeting about our "round table" for the art educator's conference and started to think about how we might present some ideas around web 2.0 without adopting a how.to approach. Once again we are turning to models or case studies that are drawn from our own practice. Rachel set up a fantastic wiki for digital.literacy last year and that has been an important starting place for me to think through web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. My experience has been limited and dubious (I'm really not the right person to be hosting this round table) but I do have a passion for networked resarch tools, and have been using delicious with senior students for 2 yrs now - as you can see over there... - so hope to be able to contribute something from this angle. But I'm worried that online searching and reading is more about using what you find than finding things to use. I hold onto a skepticism about user-generated content and have sat through one too many conference sessions on prod-users (although I think Axel Bruns does some fantastic work in this field) to really be able to celebrate web 2.0. I started to think about what we have lost since google took over our search engines and anyone could upload a photo...
There is the loss of the mystery and the shock of the dive (or surf as it was known) into the unknown. Works like Simon Penny's Babel replicate some of that surprise but outside of art contexts searching has become a process of finding what you already know is out there ... "there must be a you.tube video on that"... "someone will have written a tutorial on that" ... instead of a magical mystery tour into the unknown.
Second thing today is the opportunity to present to the panel in a conversational rather than top down way. This is exciting as it fits with my teaching philosophies and will enable me to actually practice what I preach (so to speak). I'm think about preparing a visual document that can be talked to and discussed with the panel, as we move through a sequence of key concepts. This also links into the work I'm doing with ADA as we prepare a conference format for June. We have outlined some basic principles... remote/ networked/ materials/ conversations/ ... that will become clearer as the remote keynotes are worked through.
Today then my key words are networked and conversations ... which of course form a definition of a 'learning community' a way of doing things where nodes interrelate and move and shift ... in the 1960s a networked learning environment would have been called a cybernetic system ... this was a different kind of ecology...

"creating environments that tolerate ambiguity"

2009-04-07T14:43:00.007+12:00

This phrase comes from Keith Ballard, probably the strongest (and yet implicit) influence on the development of my teaching philosophy. In his work there is an emphasis on performativity, drawn not only from feminist theory, but from a broader engagement with social justice and the complex act that is teaching and learning.
When I am thinking about media ecologies in the classroom I am thinking of ways to describe a sustained engagement with, and respect of, students and their desires for a critical creative practice that is balanced with the need to interrogate cultural and media practices as well as engage the ambiguities of technology.
Yesterday when talking with Robyn, we framed this in terms of positionality, something that Haraway repeatedly stresses. Haraway says: we must see from somewhere. Seeing from somewhere is always ambiguous, for it is not about knowingwhat someone else sees, but about knowing the investments of our own position.
Key to this is thinking through what I mean when I think about establishing a collaborative working environment. Teaching in the LAB is conversational, critical and directed. One-on-one meetings often spiral out becoming group discussions that return to individual works and experiences. The door is always open, and students from other sections are joining us.
I have just read Max van Manen's essay "The Language of Pedagogy and the Primacy of Student Experience" (1999) in it he discusses being attentive to what might seem to be mundane classroom experiences, and revisiting them through the eyes of the student. Nothing is ever truely mundane, and often decisions have to be made quickly. Van Manen discusses relational values - something that is very familiar to me through Nicolas Bourriaud's work on relational aesthetics - art is an exchange. Teaching is an exchange: both occur with constructed environments. The LAB is a constructed environment... it is relational, ambigious, respectful and engaged. Key to Van Manen's discussion are some case studies of assessment and feedback.
Crucial is an analysis of outcomes based assessment and a kind of commodity culture. I think I'll read this through again and use it to begin to address this aspect of my presentation.
Somewhere in here I'd like to reintroduce the ethics/ aesthetics relationship.
Van Manen "The practice of teaching can be regarded as a living recommedation for showing what teaching is (or should be)". (19) - reflexivity.

media ecologies part 2

2009-04-07T12:27:00.006+12:00

Ok, the model of media ecology I follow is that described by Matthew Fuller and not that described and delineated by Neil Postman. WHY? Some of this comes down to the way media are defined. Some comes down to an openess to different theoretical approaches. But media ecology (Postman) and media ecology(Fuller) are not the same thing. Where they do converge is in statements like "Media ecology is the study of media as environments" Where they differ is in the definition of media. but for the current project I need ot be able to discuss this in terms of teaching practice... which is a problem as Postman's version of media ecology is the one picked up within education, but what I need to find out is if it is still current. Next stop is a proper description of Fuller's media ecologies and the way that I apply that - basically a reworking of the text from Caro and I.

Fuller describes Postman's media ecology as the "study of media to sustain a relatively stable notion of human culture" (ME pg. 4) - key issue here is that ecology is used as interchangable with environmnet and this need or desire for stability. What I find troubling about Postman's work is the idea that envrinoments impact on people, rather than people being part of the environment, also the deterministic way that media re appraoched by anumber of media ecologists is problematic. I guess it comes back to the divergence within McLuhan studies. And my ongoing suspicians about convergence theories/ deterministic theories and media as remediation... see my thesis for more on this :)

Fuller's aproach focuses on "dynamic systems in which any one part is always multiply connected.. and always variable" this to me is a perfect description of a teaching LAB envrionment. I'll use this to begin a description of the senior electronic arts lab here at art school, as I feel a need to get some concrete examples in here.

ecologies

2009-04-07T11:25:00.003+12:00

Ok, so I need to move this on a bit quicker now. I would like to structure my presentation around two key theoretical positions the firs tis that of situated knowledge from Haraway. And the second is that of Media Ecologies as articulated by Matthew Fuller:
this is an extract from a text I wrote with Caroline McCaw about teaching digital theory/ practice, where we introduce a notion of ecology:
In a recent discussion of “media ecologies” Matthew Fuller broadly defines ecology as “the modes or dynamics that properly form or make sensible an object or process.” Fuller’s emphasis is on the formation and dynamics of media systems. His use of the term ecology draws upon Félix Guattari’s formulation of ecosophy that examines dynamic systems “in which any one part is always multiply connected, acting by virtue of those connections, and always variable, such that it can be regarded as a pattern rather than simply as an object.”
Guattari extends the definition of ecology to include human subjectivity and social concerns. This does not mean that everyone operates together to shared ends but that a social ecology is one born from dissonance, including the wider tensions of different material forces, be these human, spatial, cultural or linguistic as they operate alongside each other. So while we might isolate something (for example, a television advertisement) in order to study it, it is first necessary to examine the various contexts or systems within which it is embedded. These connections are necessarily part of the system in which the television advertisement is produced, and must be read. These ideas of dynamic ecological systems are not unique to media, but are found in a surprisingly diverse range of subjects and disciplines. For Guattari, ecologies are dynamic immanent systems."

So now I'm going to extend this in to a reflection on teaching. I'm curious about where or how Neil Postman fits into this - is he really responsible for the 'inquiry learning' approach in primary schools...I'm not sure this fits into my model for media ecologies... so there is some work to be done here.

situated knowledges

2009-04-01T09:42:00.003+13:00

I've been revisiting Donna Haraway "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" first published in Feminist Studies 1988. A link to a pdf can be found in my delicious. It is fascinating to pick this text up 20 years after its publication and I think for the first time understand many of the forecasts it offers. Haraway looks towards a practice that is not simply embodied but embedded within the systems of science and objectivity. She insists that being within "the belly of the monster" is the best vantage point. From within we can begin to develop knowledge practices that go beyond the apparently simplistic answers of various practices of Marxism and deconstruction popular in the late 80s. So this week I have read the article looking for clues as to how it has impacted on my teaching practice. It is more than an impact. I have found things in here that have become so much my own that I thought they were. It has become a lesson in learning.
Haraway worries that the imagery of the moment is that of “high-tech military fields”. (577). It is Virillio’s warning about the apparatus of vision, and the shifts power and control. Virillio asks for a acknowledgement of this, Haraway goes further asking for an informed investment in this equation. The starting point was in an understanding that every layer of knowledge and science is contestable, Haraway comments that “we unmasked the doctrines of objectivity” (578) but now need to go beyond showing bias … that there needs to be some kind of feminist version of objectivity. “Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything.” (579)
So what are the implications of this for my teaching practice. When hunting out a ‘theory’ of teaching I began with a profound sense of scepticism born from a belief in the connectedness of theory and practice and a distrust of the ‘application’ of theory. What I have found is embedded within Haraway’s practical theories of science and knowledge. In art schools teaching is about the formation of knowledge. Again and again in this essay I have found phrases/ concepts that have become part of my way of doing things.
- Thinking is active it builds things. (teaching is collaborative and communicative)
- all vision is embodied, specific, partial yet distancing. (sometimes we need to look at things that are unfamiliar, difficult and disturbing)
- knowledge is partial, locatable, and critical (you don’t need to agree with me but we must be able to say why) “struggles over what will count as rational accounts of the world are struggles over how to see.” (587)
- situated knowledges are webs of connections (webs/ networks are now literally our sources of knowledge and also the location of thought – hence the blog)
- vision is always a question of the power to see (ethics and aesthetics are intimately connected)
- positioning implies responsibility (within the space of the lab or classroom we are equally responsible for what occurs) “vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning” (586)
- the ‘object’ we study has agency and matter. Mattering is a relationship. “The world is an active subject” (593) this point is part of a bigger issue around the media we work with in electronic arts (and was key to my PhD – more on that later)

“All these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view, even when the other is our own machine.”(583)

Haraway repeats that at each step of the way we must resist simplification. This is my great difficulty with this project. How do I examine my practices without simplifying them? I’m wondering if the above list is a starting point. Whether from it I can build a picture that is situated and locatable, yet remains critical and open-ended. This is in the end what Haraway advocates.

placeholder

2009-03-19T11:03:00.004+13:00

In the land of blog posting is a sign of life. This week has escaped me as we installed the exhibition system08 in the brand new gallery. I want to spend some time thinking about this project as it reflects a hands on laboratory based teaching style that I want to develop further. In many ways I operated as a curator for the show, but in usual curatorial situations the artists involved have experience installing and thinking through all the possibilities for public engagement with their work. In the case of system08 we learnt as we did. I have previous written a paper about the integration of theory and practice in digital media (it can be found in scope:art:2 ) and this project felt like another step in the process for me.
this post is a place holder for these things, so I'm creating a list:

1. system08 as a model and as a practice
2. writing up haraway's situated knowledges as a framework for critical teaching.
3. writing up the reading on new pedagogy I've been doing.
4. thinking about presentation strategies/ engagement with tools and models
5. opening up this blog a little more to analytical processes.

Here is a photo lifted from the odt of the opening of system08. On either side of Bridie and I are two senoir students who presented a very sophistacated performance/ surveillance piece. They were engaging directly with power relations and the assumption of uniform behaviours under public surveillance. So good that one polite visitor asked Mishca "waht do you do when you are not a security guard?" answer "I'm an artist!"

entropy

2009-03-06T16:32:00.004+13:00

I've been reading Susan McKenna and her discussion of theory and practice. ("Theory and Practice: revisiting critical pedagogy in studio art education" Art Journal, spring, 1999). What is interesting is how many of the issues she raises are still current today. However some of the ways to address them are radically different. My problem with her essay is also perhaps the result of nearly 10 yrs more thought. In her text the problematic relation of theory and practice is introduced to a debate surraunding anti-intellectualism. And for me the idea that art is anti-intellectual is the same kind of discussion that photography fell foul of in the 1980s - "but is it art?" It is so redundant, that it misses the point. Perhaps this is because I have come to studio teaching from a history of teaching theory. What I am learning is not that studio (practice) is anti-intellectual) but that theory (theory) is still framed in inappropriate ways. That can force it away from the art. I think (hope) that I work in a very different way. Today I used the spiral to donut film (below) to frame a discussion of entropy. This was the last in a series of studio seminar sessions about systems and networks designed to get the senior electronic arts students thinking about the very materials they work with and some of the politics of these media. The works we discussed were directly drawn form the interests of the students and the projects they are working on, but I drew these out to a bigger picture: To Robert Smithson and his Spiral Jetty, and his positive reading of entropy: To Claude Shannon and his attempts in 1948 to route information down telephone lines that inevitably lead to the SAGE system and to military applications of networked systems: To the very computers that we use that are now reading video footage and printing 3D images ( see gareth Long's Video Solid project ... http://garethlong.net/videoSolid/videoSolid.html). What connected these things was not theory but the very studio projects we are engaged with. Studio WAS the theory, it contributed a framework, presented us with a shared language and enabled us to discuss and analyse the material. Teaching "theory" in studio then is not about one plus the other but about finding aspects of making and practice embedded in the thoughts and ideas we engage. Although McKenna does not go this far in her essay she does head towards a point where studio is understood via the identification of ideological frameworks. After all as she says we are simply teaching students how to look from a particular situated position. It reminds me again of WSST and Donna Haraway's "Situated Knowledge". I need to go back to this essay that I probably haven't read for 15 years....

from donut to spiral

2009-03-05T09:16:00.002+13:00

I'm thinking about how to prepare the final seminar about networks/ systems for my seniors tomorrow. This video somehow helps. Smithson/ entropy/ systems but also the journey/ making video. Charlotte is calling, I'll come back to this later.
article on Deborah Logorio's work can be found here: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/deborah_ligorio/

in no particular order

2009-03-02T13:31:00.004+13:00

One of the interesting things about blogging is it gives the illusion of a linear progression of events. However neither my teaching practice nor my life work in this way. Today (as I juggle a grumpy Charlotte) I have been thinking about the senior electronic arts projects and all the fantastic places these 15 students have taken the initial brief. We began with Nicholas Negroponte's "seek" from 1972 exhibited in Jack Burnham's exhibition "Software" at the Jewish Museum. My PhD used Burnham's work as a key starting point to discuss systems and new way of thinkng through materiality , in terms of connections between objects rather than objects themselves. This tangent in systems aestehtics has been especially fruitful to work with as I intruduce students to the wider ecologies of electronic arts. this is an image of seek

:And next week I'll post some images of the final works in this project. In the digital culture seminars I run alongside the studio project we have discovered the work of Semiconductor:

So when I think about teaching as an improvisational practice (more on this later) I am thinking not just about this structural need to systematically follow through on tangents, but the very real classroom experience of ideas and processes unfolding before us. I think an initial brief in studio is really more like Jorge Luis Borges' "garden of forking paths". We will see where this leads us as our paths weave and flow over the next two weeks.
That for me is the encapsulation of teaching and learning.

listserv's and mail

2009-02-27T16:17:00.004+13:00

In 1993 I had finished my Art school degree and decided it was necessary to finish off a BA that had been sitting waiting. I had been inspired by the postmodern politics of art theory at art school and found myself finally locating a voice within a set of emergent disciplines. Without really understanding why I enrolled in Sarah William's Women's studies course "women and Sexuality visavis science and technology".
amongst many things I was introduced to the world of the listserv:

LN: wsst

MO: Sarah Williams (sarah.williams@stonebow.otago.ac.nz)

SU: uotago@stonebow.otago.ac.nz

SA: wsst@stonebow.otago.ac.nz

This list operates as a Women's Studies bulletin board with a

particular emphasis on teaching and resourcing Women's Studies.

The listserv was a place to discuss outside of class. and we spent hours waiting for our texts to upload. Slowly we created a space for work and discussion outside of the intense 2hr seminar we attended each week. Sarah's methods were a breath of fresh air. We had to work exceptionally hard to be up-to-speed for each week. the class preparation happened by the students in the seminar we would present our findings and discusison points in the seminar and as we progressed Sarah stepped back and became a facilitator.
By the end of the course I had a new world view, and understood not only about my own preferred ways of working but about the integration of these social /cultural theories wiht a work practice that I still maintain today.

ressurection

2009-02-27T11:55:00.002+13:00

Ok, that worked well!!
Two years later, I am back in Dunedin (with the lovely 5 mth old charlotte beside me) thinking about the best way to revive this blog and make it a useful research tool. Inspired by the need to complete my tertiary teaching qualification, I've decided to use this blog as a method to communicate with my advisor, and work towards preparation of a full presentation. I'm hoping that here I can reflect back on previous practice and reflect forward to current practice.
First I want to think through the integration of delicious tagging: social tagging as networked resaerch/ teaching. I'd like to see how others are using this in their teaching practice.
That's a current starting point. Something about delicious works for me ... see evidence right here!!
In terms of historical first steps I need to think about Sarah Williams and her amazing WS303 course Women and Technology that I took in 1992 - ish. So my next post will be thinking about Sarah and her methods and how it opened me to a new kind of teaching practice.

why blog?

2007-11-11T03:19:00.001+13:00

Ok, so I decided that I needed to do this to find out what it did. What have I found? It is not possible to listen to a lecture with my laptop on my lap. When people have their laptops open in lecture theatres they are checking email and doing other things. I have discovered it can be a productive space. So to blog it is necessary to first listen, then take notes, then think, and then write. it is a long process. It takes time. But what does it do to the information? I'm finding that an invisible audience determines my adherence to the material I am listening to. The best blogs out there form opinions and reflect on these opinions - simultaneously. I have not yet learnt how to do this. My experience of the blog is much like my experience of prague. It is like standing on the street lost, looking at the place on the map where you should be without being able to match it up to where you are. The image of the map takes over and the need to match the city to the map dominates. The map does not tell the truth in this city. It is better to just keep walking and walk yourself out of the lost space into another space. This is also not quite the space of the flaneur. This is not my city that I might pretend to navigate. And the blog is the same, it is an artifice: a map of some thoughts that potentially do not need to be mapped. Should what goes on at a conference be left within the walls of the conference hall? The images screened are now snapped. We photograph powerpoints for revision. Does this mean that I stop thinking about what I am hearing, here and now and instead think about how it fits to the map I have?
So I have pages of notes that I intend to blog. but will I? and what will happen to that information when I do blog it. Will I remember it more than usual?
The blog is the death of the meme.
Here is the flying chair from yesterday.

The arts catalyst

2007-11-09T23:14:00.000+13:00

The Arts Catalyst: from London
has done a number of commissions. Worked with Steve Kurtz CAE. Worked with sourcing materials ethically through legitimate channels. worked to recreate sea trials off coast of isle of lewis. Made the work "Marching Plague."
Showed video of Steve Kurtz spraying ICA with some pre-emptive research.
And a series of interesting works.
Ben Blakebrow (?) flying machine.
Simon Faithful "escape vehicle no 6." a full scale chair suspended beneath a weather balloon.. with a camera lens that frames chair dangling in mid shot. launched into space the chair takes off into the void. the camera watched this as the chair transmitted back to earth. when reaches the edge of space the baloon pops adn the chair falls back to earth with a red parachute. "to imagine occupying the chair is imagining life beyond the earth." (images to follow)
London field works - space baby.
The human being is one of the mammals that does not hibernate yet needs hibernation in terms of long term space travel. looks at the university of Leichster research into "sleep gene" (that doesn't exist- but might). And working on hibernation pods with undergrads at artschool in india.. (missed name).
Made pods that they slept in in the gallery and scientists came and took samples of blood analysing gene shifts.
"We like to feel that living on the frontiers of investigation we are creating new forms of active and creative curatorship probing into science and society."

art at the international space station

2007-11-09T22:47:00.000+13:00

Takuro Osaka
making cultural social sciences projects at the international space station. experiments in kinetic art in zero gravity.
zero gravity water art and zero gravity kinetic art.
making marbled paintings by floating paint in zero gravity. etc.
there is something interesting here in terms of experimentation, but it remains at the level of fascination with events and no direct engagement with them. The question why? is never asked.
he says that he is trying to share the experiences of the astronauts.

Roger Malina - limits of cognition

2007-11-09T22:17:00.000+13:00

Malina is a scientist who is currently building telescopes to look at dark matter. Malina argues that the way we think at the moment is not the right way to think. This is because outerspace is fundamentally different and so we can't "think it". this is mainly because it is not in our scale. He is spending 10 yrs building a new hubble-like telescope to look at dark matter.
Argues we need to name new kinds of things and develop new linguistic systems, this is because we cannot extrapolate!! it is dangerous and misleading.
If you want to know something new you have to change yourself. So follows maturana saying that system can only know new things if it redesigns itself from the inside - aka stelarc.
"Reality has to do with causation and our notions of reality arise from out abilities to change the world." ian hacking.
astronomers cannot do experiments on the universe - must build simulations - hayles difference between pre-diction and retro-diction. experiments on simulations and not on the world. Abstraction is what the scientist does, immersion is what the artist does.
the senses - augmentation - martian robot - extended touch.
hubble picture 2m diametre pupil - augmented sight.
this is an instrumentalist perspective - makes instruments in order to be able to understand things.
Key problem is the inadequacy of human cognition... training set on prior experience, langauge as a pre-condition.
Maturana " how we are organised structures what we can know and how we can know it."
Interesting that the telescope is unimaginable to leonadro da vinci - this is because he would not know how to pull it apart.
So what we need to do is build a new sensuality and new cognition. following new leonardo book: "the hidden sense" Van Campen 2007.
And we need a more intimate science: we need to own the data about our own environment. - ie. tap the barometer rather than watch the news to find out what the weather is.
we really only know what we need to know to survive.

What is space? = it is a construct of our perceptual system. Our perceptual system creates objects and relationships between objects.

prague

2007-11-09T22:14:00.000+13:00

mutamorphosis in prague

2007-11-08T22:08:00.000+13:00

in the municipal library in prague. a combination of intense scientific analysis and discussions of art projects that emerge from these. many images of cells. and discussion of life in the present as understood through the emergence of primative cells 5 billion years ago.

blood-dust

2007-11-08T22:03:00.000+13:00

Kathleen Rogers. Making installations using zebra fish. Interested in biological phenomena and the ephemeral changes in cell division. chromosomes are still unfathomable. there are sustained states that are both neither alive nor dead. our cells do this at impossible speed. it is like a fast emptiness of atomic forces. the is a chemical alliance with other life forms. theories of sympiosis argue that all life forms are commonly evolved from the same micro-bacterial genetics. all biological events within the human body are still the same as those from the other life forms 4.5 billion years ago. this is a process of birth and death. everything renews. maintanence and renewal of blood the most significant.

ISEA singapore

2007-09-24T20:22:00.000+12:00

ISEA Call for Papers, Panels and Artist Presentations

ISEA invites submissions to the conference of the International
Symposium on Electronic Art 2008 that will be held in Singapore between
25th & 30th July 2008. This symposium consists of three aspects of peer
reviewed conference(s), internationally juried exhibition(s) and
various in-conjunction and partner events.

The conference, as in previous ISEAs, is expected to bring together
artists, theorists, historians, curators and researchers of media arts
from around the world to jointly explore the most urgent and exciting
questions in the field. The conference is held alongside workshops,
courses, exhibitions, performances and other in-conjunction events that
will be held for the duration of ISEA2008 from 25th July to August 3rd
2008.

ISEA welcome contributions from creative practitioners and researchers
from a variety of disciplines and institutional contexts as media arts
benefits from and exemplifies the interdisciplinary linkages between
contemporary art, science, technology and their related philosophies,
pedagogies and institutional practices.

Call for Papers closes on the 30th of September 2007.

The five themes of ISEA2008 are especially focused on eliciting a wide
range of international scholars and artists. The themes are; Locating
Media, Wiki Wiki, Ludic Interfaces, Border Transmissions and Reality
Jam. For more information visit http://www.isea2008.org/cfp.html.

ISEA or also known as International Symposium on Electronic Arts was
initiated in 1988, is the world' s premier media arts event for the
critical discussion and showcase of creative productions applying new
technologies in interactive and digital media. Held biannually in
various cities throughout the world, this migratory event is being held
in Asia for the second time in its history, after Singapore
successfully secured this bid.

disrupting narratives at the tate

2007-08-31T11:12:00.000+12:00

.
>>
For those of you who weren't able to make it over to London for the Disrupting Narratives symposium (Mark Amerika, Alex Galloway, Paul Sermon, Kate Rich, Kelli Dipple, Andrea Zapp, Kate Southworth) that was held at Tate Modern, London, on July 13th you might be interested to know that the video archive is now live and can be accessed (with flash 8 or higher) at:
>
> http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/disrupting_narratives/default.jsp
>

online art auction art

2007-08-29T10:49:00.001+12:00

This month at Window, Atlanta based artist William Boling staged a
multi-part online project centering around auction sites. Boling
found, photographed and auctioned a series of objects from both eBay
and TradeMe: deer hooves and halloween masks, stockings and plastic
dolphins.

The artist has compiled documentation on these auctions into 10
limited edition signed books, which he'll be auctioning off over the
next few days. The catalogs include "reproductions of the documents
auctioned, screen captures from pertinent moments in the course of the
auctions and an appendix with other relevant transactional documents
such as correspondence between the artist and auction buyers".

*YOU AIN'T WRONG CATALOG*, Closes: Sat, 1 Sep
http://www.trademe.co.nz/Art/Other/auction-115169190.htm

For more information on the project, visit http://www.youaintwrong.co.nz/

Luke Munn
Online Curator, Window
http://window.auckland.ac.nz/

camera.obscura

2007-08-28T11:35:00.000+12:00

Here is the person who 'proved' vermeer really did use a camera obscura and some of his images.

'Vermeer's Camera' by Philip Steadman, published by Oxford University Press, April 2002.

cloudy-images-of-the-Sydney-Opera-House-on-Google-Earth-prior-t

2007-08-27T20:51:00.000+12:00

cloudy-images-of-the-Sydney-Opera-House-on-Google-Earth-prior-to-the-APEC-summit
story
(http://soulsphincter.blogspot.com/2007/08/google-censoring-sydney-images-again.html).
It is interesting when one thinks about it in terms of the nature of
information and censorship. A map is a powerful media for making the
world, I happen to be reading Lefebvre last night:

"The state and each of its constituent institutions call for spaces - but
spaces which they can then organize according to their specific
requirements; so there is no sense in which space can be treated solely as
an a priori condition of these institutions and the state which presides
over them." "The Production of Space" p85

Google has a dilemma as it is dealing so often with the spaces of which
society/ies are 'made' with all their political and power exchanges.
Google creates and provides access to information spaces or it refuses to
do so, depending on the geo-political location of the seeker. Under normal
conditions the image of the Sydney Opera House is an iconic construction
promoted by the Australian Tourist Commission. But in light of the APEC
summit it seems that Google has had to downgrade their claims to the Opera
House Image. Their image has become more symbolic for the duration of
APEC. The physical area around the Opera House is also being barricaded
off for the duration of the APEC meeting. The space has become a sort of
Holy of Holies where only the authorized have even direct visual access.

I recently returned from a journey to Australia and brought with me a map
depicting the hundreds of Aboriginal language groups which existed prior
to colonization
(http://www.univ-lr.fr/international/australie.recherche/page28aactuel/carteabo/carteaustralie.jpg).
Showing this map to a colleague who is a linguist he was amazed, saying
what a different picture it gave of "Australia". Indeed as we create media
we construct images of what spaces are. Taking away images removes our
(and presumably potential ‘terrorists’) ability to claim and use these
spaces for unauthorized purposes.

/jim B.

i know everybody's more interested in talking about social networking
platforms and Second Life these days... but are there any good
old-fashioned Paranoids left out there?

this (below) raises some big questions about freedom of information,
the corporate-state info-nexus, etc. would love to hear from some
enraged Google-bashers (if you exist?)...

dt

(from SMH online)
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/08/13/1186857396182.html

Much of Sydney's CBD as it appears in the satellite images on Google
Maps Australia has been fuzzed out, just weeks before the APEC summit.

Google says the imagery was downgraded as a result of a "commercial
issue" with a supplier, but the move has aroused speculation it was
done at the request of police in order to minimise the risk of a
terrorist attack during the September summit, where Sydney will play
host to 21 world leaders including U.S. President George W. Bush....

video networks

2007-08-10T16:18:00.000+12:00

Announcing the release of Video Networks by Garrett Lynch:

http://www.asquare.org/project/videonetworks/

and the collaborative two channel video installation, Dialogues by
Garrett Lynch and Frédérique Santune:

http://www.asquare.org/project/videonetworks/dialogues/

---------------------------------------------------------------

Video Networks is a research project consisting of the development of
an electronic interface system for enabling the creation of networked
or connected video based art works and the works produced with this
system.

It's purpose is to explore the potential of creating works which are
cinematic in nature yet break away from fixed linear narratives to
explore concepts such as montage, collage, mixing, rhythm, looping,
non-linearity in combination with simple interactivity in real time.

The interface system employs a combination of reverse engineered
inexpensive consumer electronics and some custom hardware to enable
devices such as DVD players, monitors, video cameras, projectors etc.
to communicate, in effect network and influence each other.

The first work employing the prototype system, entitled Dialogues, is
a two channel video installation conceived and created by artists
Garrett Lynch (http://www.asquare.org/) and Frédérique Santune
(http://www.saturne-feerique.net/) which explores ideas of
exploration, mapping and translation will be followed by subsequent
thematic explorations using the interface system.

Video Networks has been partially funded by Canterbury Christ Church
University and has been developed in cooperation with the Department
of Electronics at the University of Kent.

media memories and archives/ video vortex

2007-08-10T10:52:00.000+12:00

Argos, Centre for Art & Media, and PACKED present:

Media, Memory and the Archive
CONFERENCE
ARGOS, Brussels
Sa 06.10.2007 11:00-19:00

How will generations after us look back on artistic production of the
20th and 21st centuries? Media formats, operating systems, software
and hardware, browsers and the internet as we know it today will have
evolved beyond recognition, both in shape and in use. What strategies
might be used to transpose technology-based works, variable, hybrid
and ephemeral by nature, to an unknown and unpredictable future? How
can intent, context and experience be recorded and permanently
interpreted? The archiving process does not merely represent an
attempt to preserve some notions, it also implicates that others will
be forgotten. What is relevant for preservation? What is the impact
of used models, technical structures and tools on the construction
of cultural memory? How does information travel through time, now
that the world is being (re)presented and organised more and more as
a database, dynamic and networked? How will museums and other memory
institutions cope with these new paradigms and what is the role media
artists and we ourselves might have in the structuring of public memory?

Speakers: Richard Rinehart, Steve Dietz, Josephine Bosma, Oliver
Grau, Charlie Gere, Wolfgang Ernst, Jean-François Blanchette

Moderated by Marleen Wynants (CROSSTALKS, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- VUB)

www.packed.be

www.argosarts.org

------------------------------------------------------------

Media, Memory and the Archive is part of OPEN ARCHIVE#1, a series of
programs and events in which Argos mines the archive, reflecting and
presenting a range of responses to the argos collections as well as
considering the nature of the contemporary archive, media and memory.

Please note: on Fr 05.10.2007, the day before ‘Media, Memory and the
Archive’, Argos and INC are organizing the conference ‘Video Vortex:
Responses to YouTube’ with Lev Manovich, Nora Barry, Keith Sanborn,
Tomas Rawlings & Ana Kronschnabl, Simon Ruschmeyer, Peter Westenberg,
Johan Grimonprez. Others tbc.
More info soon

argos
Werfstraat 13 rue du Chantier
B-1000 Brussels
Belgium
tel +32 2 229 00 03
fax +32 2 223 73 31

stoffel@argosarts.org