FCJManager
FCJ-071 Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature
Scott Rettberg The University of Bergen Introduction Too often the discourse surrounding contemporary digital art and electronic literature treats these artifacts as if the most compelling aspects about them are their novelty, their very newness. One need look no further than the theme of the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture Conference, ‘The Future of Digital Media Culture’, to see this. Because our orientation is always forward towards the future, we are inclined toward a kind of myopia, and reluctance to look at the new through the lens of the past. With this orientation, there is furthermore a danger of placing too high a value on novelty at the expense of other aesthetic and ideological criteria. We see this in new media art discourse again and again. Turf wars regularly take place over ‘firstness’ – which designer was the first to use this technique, who was the first to integrate this…
FCJ-070 Art and (Second) Life: Over the hills and far away?
Caroline McCaw Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand Introduction I must admit a general unease yet compulsive fascination towards the emerging social environments in Second Life. Partly I am wary of the time commitment associated with learning and developing the necessary skills for a full community participation in Second Life. By this I am referring to both time to develop both the technical proficiencies as well as the time to develop and maintain friendships and community connections that combine to actualize a socially participatory experience appropriate to a resident rather than a tourist or visitor. Here time becomes a currency, and while every artist and researcher must invest time, it is the consideration of extra time at a networked computer that must have as its consequence less time in the grounded experiences at ‘home’, with my immediate and very physically located friends and family. In this sense I confess that my…
FCJ-069 Cultural Roots for Computing:The Case of African Diasporic Orature and Computational Narrative in the GRIOT System
D. Fox Harrell, Georgia Institute of Technology fox.harrell@lcc.gatech.edu Introduction Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so ornery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner’s swine (Ishmael Reed, the opening to Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down,1969). Signifying, the African diasporic tradition of one-upmanship by verbally stringing together escalating oblique hyperboles, invigorates the passage above with its crescendo-ing description of ‘a bad man’. Signifying is but one important trope in African diasporic oral traditions, which often gains evocative power by employing oratory tropes (Gates Jr, 1988). In his essay ‘Oral Power and Europhone Glory’, author and theorist Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1998) identifies and elaborates a set…
FCJ-068 The Aesthetics of the Ambient Video Experience
Jim Bizzocchi Simon Fraser University What is Ambient Video? You are enjoying yourself at a cocktail party, engrossed in discussion with a colleague you have just met. He excuses himself to visit the hors d’oeuvres, and you turn your attention to the large flat-panel television display on the wall. Your eye is caught by the beauty of a sublime mountain landscape, and then you are surprised when a waterfall explodes between two of the high peaks and tumbles down to a lake at the bottom of the frame. The splash of the waterfall spreads in circles across the lake, and as it spreads, it gradually transforms the shot into a completely different scene. You gaze is caught by both the magic realist aesthetics of transformation and by the sheer beauty of the visuals themselves (see Figure 1 below) (Bizzocchi, 2004). Then, your companion returns, and you return your attention to…
FCJ-067 Art Against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice
Mitchell Whitelaw, University of Canberra Canberra, Australia Introduction In digital, networked culture, we spend our lives engaged with data systems. Although our experience is shaped by interfaces, friendly surfaces, we are inevitably aware of their functional undersides. The web is increasingly a set of interfaces to datasets. In 2004 Alan Liu observed the page-based paradigm of the web being interrupted by database incursions — what he called ‘data pours’ (Liu, 2004). On the contemporary web the data pour has become the rule, rather than the exception. The so-called ‘web 2.0’ paradigm further abstracts web content into feeds, real-time flows of XML data. In the background of these developments — what Liu characterises as the post-industrial rationalisation of networked culture — is data itself. In this context it is not surprising that new media art has in recent years turned towards data as both subject and material. In 2001, exhibitions such…
FCJ-066 The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage
Axel Bruns Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology Introduction: Towards Produsage 2005 and 2006 saw the popular recognition and commercial embrace of a phenomenon which is set to deeply affect the intellectual life of developed and developing nations for years to come. Yahoo! bought Flickr. Google acquired YouTube. Rupert Murdoch purchased MySpace, and declared the future of his NewsCorp empire to lie in the user-led content creation spaces of such social software Websites more than in its many newspapers, broadcast channels, and other media interests (Murdoch, 2005). Finally, TIME broke with its long-standing tradition of nominating one outstanding public figure as ‘person of the year’, and instead selected ‘you’: all of us who are active in collaborative online spaces (Grossman, 2006). However, the significance of the user-led phenomenon lies not in such (ultimately hollow) honours, or even only in the central spaces of YouTube and Flickr – instead, true…
Issue 11 – DAC Conference
The Futures of Digital Media Arts and Culture In the early 1990s, the very term ‘digital’ was novel. Yet over the past several decades it is apparent that applications and innovations in e-mail, the Internet, mobile media, complex data systems and computational practice, video games and networking software have become an essential and dynamic part of contemporary art and culture. Increasingly, research in new media (and ‘newer’ new media) interprets the arrival of these emergent forms, addressing the sometimes unexpected social, cultural and aesthetic uses and implications of developing digital technologies and interfaces. The eleven papers presented here from the perthDAC (Digital Arts and Culture) 2007 conference offer a broad spectrum of perspectives on the future of digital media art and culture, speculating on recent trends and developments, presenting research outcomes, describing works in progress, or documenting histories and challenging existing paradigms of digital media use, creation and perception. They…
FCJ-065 RoundTable on Technology, Teaching and Tools
This is a roundtable audio interview conducted by James Farmer (Edublogs) with Anne Bartlett-Bragg (University of Technology Sydney) and Chris Bigum (Deakin University). Skype was used to make and record the audio conference and the resulting sound file was edited by Andrew McLauchlan. roundtable.mov You can download the file by right or control clicking on this link Author’s Biographies Anne Bartlett-Bragg (ABB)-Cert IV AWT, Dip HRM, Dip e-Learning, BEd (Adult Education), MEd (Adult Education), PhD candidate. Currently she is working as a part-time academic in the Faculty of Education at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She developed and delivers e-Learning content – in the organisational context. Anne also has a consultancy business, Digital Dialogues, and is the Executive Director of the Learning Technologies User Group (LTUG), and a member of the advisory board for the Australian Businesswomen’s Network. https://digitaldialogues.blogs.com/ Professor Chris Bigum BSc, Dip.Ed, PhD, is Dean of the…
FCJ-064 Some thoughts on the evolution of digital media studies
Lisa Gye, Media and Communications Swinburne University of Technology June 13, 1993 – Can you read that? in St Kilda, a somewhat run-down, turn of the century beach suburb in Melbourne – glorious architecture, too many cafes now that the intelligentsia have rediscovered its charm – and my friend is in Northcote, across town, only about 15 kilometres away but worlds apart. Northcote is north of the city and while it’s still considered to be inner-city by the real estate agents, it is only just beginning its upward spiral towards gentrification. We’re playing a networked game of Doom on our newly acquired 14400 modems and talking on the telephone. “Yes, yes, I can see you”. We’re yet to discover the inbuilt text function in the game that would allow us to dispense with the phones and chat via the screens. I’m blown away, metaphorically. And then, literally, as my friend…
FCJ-063 The Digital, the Virtual and the Naming of Knowledge
Darren Jorgensen Curtin University, Western Australia Amidst shifting modalities of culture, inflected with new technologies and changing social desires, university disciplines have experienced seismic shifts in focus. Literature and Cultural Studies are being superseded by Communication Studies, Creative Enterprise, Creative Industries, Converged Media and other such nominalisms. In my workplace, the structure that was inaugurated only a few years before is already looking clunky, an outdated batch of titles and course content. Is it still appropriate to be talking about ‘Multimedia’? Are ‘New Media’, ‘Digital Media’ and ‘Converged Media’ sufficiently different substitutes? Are animation and gaming the province of Multimedia, Design, Art or Film and Television studies? From the growing number of enquiries from students about crossing areas we have been forced to look at the relations between them, and yet it seems that no amount of synergy could adequately capture the multifarious interests of a wired generation. We are…
Future Issues and Archives
Connections
- ARCDigital
- C-Theory
- Cntr History & New Media
- CoDE
- Computational Culture
- Cosmos and History
- Ctrl-Z
- Culture Machine
- Digital Culture and Ed…
- Digital Humanities Alliance
- Digital Studies
- Eludamos
- Film-Philosophy
- First Monday
- Future of the Book
- Hyperrhiz
- Inflexions
- Institute of Net Cultures
- Jrnal Digital Information
- Junctures
- nmediac
- Noema
- Open Humanities Alliance
- Open Humanities Press
- Parrhesia
- Public Library of Science
- Sarai
- Transformations
- Vague Terrain
