Writing Within the Map by Jeremy Hight
Why not be able to search a place for its stories, its poetry, and its metaphors and why not be able to select what you desire as well as be able to create such things specifically for this place itself?
The Disappearance of Signs in a Landscape of Deceptions by Lanfranco Aceti
The artwork A Dream Came Through started as an idea in 2006 and was developed in 2008 before the current capitalistic crisis and temporary rebirth of a social conscience in the Western World. 2006 was a time when a critique of the capitalist models of production of riches and their lack of distribution was neither fashionable nor intellectually sensible.
The focus of the artwork is on the interpretations and re-interpretations of the roles of the migrant and the politics of labor. The performative element of the project also challenges and questions the structural frameworks of labor by highlighting a condition of commodification and exploitation that is globally enforced.
Thoughts on Participatory Art by Yiannis Colakides & Helene Black
Bouncing off the discussion from this May on “Critical Spatial Movement,” we were struck by how the digital traces of 0s and 1s allow for traces of movement, interaction, and networking to exist or live on through various vehicles such as the web or other virtual spaces such as Second Life. We were also thinking about current trends in the international art world that extend practice into the areas of social networks by engaging the participation of the viewer. Participatory Art converges with such areas as the social sciences, activism, politics, ecology and sustainability, genetics and science, and even food. How might digital traces of artistic corporeal and cyber configurations of embodiment empower participatory artistic practice and collaboration? And how might we understand the “after image” or “after life” of live participatory interventions when they live on morph into digital, spectral traces?
Locative Media and Spatial Narratives by Martin Rieser
This paper explores the debates around past and present locative practice and sets them against such models drawn from a broad range of cultural artefacts and their potential lessons for contemporary locative media art and interactive public art practice. Specifically examined are issues of architecture and ritual space, and the spatialisation of narrative, including Aboriginal Australian, Amerindian, Celtic, Hindu and Christian sacred architectures and land art.
Rhizomatic Cartography: Modulated Mapping and the spatial net by Jeremy Hight
Mapping, or cartography to use the fancier term, is simply a tool that answers the question: where are we? This tool’s face and structure has only shown signs of fluidity in terms of name changes and borders, but deeper and subtler signs of fluidity and both physical and cultural evolution have yet to change the map’s nature until now with such technology as GIS and GPS. However, mapping in tools used is no longer static. We are in a time, arguably, that is the greatest cultural return to cartography and, in tandem, progression of mapping and related tools in several hundred years. GPS units in cars and in phones are now ubiquitous and continually progressing in interface design and functionality. Locative media in several areas from art to modes of annotation of spaces are also evolving at a rapid rate. A confluence with increasingly sophisticated modes of social networking and data insemination of mapping and spatial augmentation, needs to occur.
Delaying Demolition by Aristide Antonas
“Despite all the destruction,” the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi wrote of the Parthenon in 1667, “no other mosque known to us can open up shining paths in the soul of man. Every time you visit, you discover more and more new masterpieces, which-during previous visits-escaped your notice.” He also admired the sixty pure white “marble columns” that “attained a height of twenty-five cubits,” he also admired the “reliefs and the decorations” but mainly, he admired the four columns made of ruby red marble, which could “reflect even the shade of one’ face,” the “gold-plated dome,” the “four pillars of green marble near the minbar… decorated with elaborate flowers,” “the colours and the stones on the doors and the walls that resemble eyes, of cats and of fish, etc.”
Immersive Event Time by Jeremy Hight
Time is plastic. Our linear measure is man made for convenience. The oversimplification of minutes, hours, days is functional in a base utilitarian sense, yes, but fails to account for point of entry, context, point of view, the density of what is occurring in time and how it is thus experienced. Time is geometric; it also has the experiential component and this has height, width, variation and forms from point of view and processes differently with each individual. An event in time thus is not only to be measured in its variable detail, but also of its place in time. This is not a time-line.
The Decision and the Gap by Aristide Antonas
“Art is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it conveys on the state of social and political issues. Nor is it political owing to the way it represents social structures, conflicts or identities. It is political by virtue of the very distance that it takes with respect to those functions. It is political insofar as it frames not only works or monuments, but also a specific space-time sensorium, as this sensorium defines ways of being together or being apart, of being inside or outside, in front of or in the middle of, etc. It is political as its own practices shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices, manners of being and modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a commonsense, which means a “sense of the common” embodied in a common sensorium”.
The Archival Event by Timothy Murray
Cornell University’s “Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art” is an archival repository and study center with a broad array of international new media art and its documentation. In 2002, I founded the Archive, which I continue to develop and curate in the Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. The Goldsen Archive profits from this Division’s commitment to the public access of its materials and growing interest in digital preservation. In addition to significant holdings of internet art, anchored by the LJUBLJANA INFOS 2000 collection, which I curated with Teo Spiller, and the collection of CTHEORY Multimedia, which was produced in the Cornell Library under the curatorial direction of me and Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, the Goldsen Archive is the repository of the annual competition in New Media Art administered by National Video Resources with assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation (some fifty sets of dossiers and work samples annually), as well as the holder of perhaps the world’s most extensive collection of art on CD-Rom, a collection anchored by the CD-Roms from 23 countries in the exhibition, “Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom,” which I toured internationally from 1999-2004.
Form Follows Data by Andrew Vande Moere
This paper analyzes the relationships between creative design and the field of information visualization, with a focus on historical connotations and newest developments that show great potential. Empirical evidence shows how designers often employ information visualization as a creative concept capable of significantly determining the design outcome, and vice versa, how information visualization can be enhanced by exploring interdisciplinary concepts, such as design cognition, user engagement, aesthetics and art. Several symbiotic dependencies are explained and demonstrated, including the first conceptual cyberspace and information architecture definitions. This paper will argue that information visualization should be enriched with the principles of creative design and art, to develop valuable data representations that address the emotional experience and engagement of users, instead of solely focusing on task effectiveness metrics. Finally, several interdisciplinary movements are described that show great symbiotic potential in the near future, especially in the fields of ambient information displays, informative art and location-based information awareness.
IMCA