Keith Armstrong Australia Council New Media Arts Fellow These artworks invent a gift-exchange community involved in a more intimate sense of transactions that we usually consider impersonal. (Saper, 2001:x) In 2005, The Australian Centre For the Moving Image promoted Intimate Transactions as follows: An immersive, interactive installation unlike any other, members of the public can experience…
Susan Ballard School of Art, Otago Polytechnic In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered … There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening … It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which…
Anna Munster & Geert Lovink College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales and University of Amsterdam, Netherlands “Distributed aesthetics: form or forming?” We are moving from living, analysing and imaging contemporary culture as an information society technically underwritten by the computer, to inhabiting and imagining relays of entwined and fragmented techno-social networks. New…
& beyond: anticipating distributed aesthetics Darren Tofts Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Connectivity, interactivity and displacement have accelerated situations of difference. The social concept of networked communities, which preoccupied us in the ‘90s, has its correlative in a particular strand of aesthetics. Distributed and distributable media have made a significant impact upon the way we…
Finding new terminology for emerging art and cultural practices or for media and technological constellations is bound to be contentious. On lists, blogs and during face-to-face forums and conferences we continue to debate what the term new media entails, let alone whether this provides an umbrella for wearable computing, smart materials, mobile phone movies or…
Dong-Hoo Lee University of Incheon, Korea Introduction Mobile phones have extended human activities beyond the constraints of time and space by increasing mobile communicability en route and real time interaction. These devices have evolved into multi-functional media that can function as camera phones, camcorders, MP3s, PDAs, wireless Internet and so on, and have constructed and…
Lin Prøitz Institutt for Medier og Kommunikasjon, University of Oslo, Norway Introduction The time will come, when Mrs. Smith would spend an hour with Mrs. Brown very enjoyably cutting up Mrs. Robinson over the telephone. (de Sola Pool, 1977: 33, cited in Due, 2003) The telephone was launched in the late 19th century, accompanied by…
Rowan Wilken University of Melbourne Introduction Place is a much maligned notion within contemporary critical discourse. It is criticised for its lack of definitional precision; it is linked to strategies of exclusion; it is seen as marginal to modernist considerations of time and space; and with the emergence of cyberspace and virtual community, it is…
Larissa Hjorth RMIT University, Melbourne Domesticating cartographies Introduction to mobile telephonic practices and spaces As a vehicle arguably furthering the collapsing between work and leisure distinctions, the mobile phone is a clear extension of what Raymond Williams dubbed ‘mobile privatization’ (1974). Here one can still be physically within the home and yet, simultaneously, be electronically…
Felicity Colman and Christian McCrea School of Art History, Cinema Studies, Classics & Archaeology, University of Melbourne If a network forms a social relation between gestural beings, then that same network must also connect our dissatisfactions of broken relations and our hopes for their renewal. The elliptical gap that generates this frustration is encircled by…