FCJManager
FCJ-048 Land of a Couple of Dances: Global and Local Influences on Freestyle Play in Dance Dance Revolution
Gillian “Gus” Andrews – Columbia University As a few scholars of media have begun to note, Actor-Network Theory is uniquely suited to unite the disparate models of the social role of media presented throughout the past century. Where some social constructivist scholars worry that Marshall McLuhans work attributes too much agency to media products themselves, ANT welcomes this idea and suggests we look at how human power is in fact invested in and extended through these products, as Joost Van Loon and Matthew Fuller have detailed in their work (Fuller, 2005; Van Loon, 2005). Where a Chomskyan or Bagdikianian view assumes that media monopolies and other hegemonies retain all power in determining the interpretation of a message, ANT keeps the construction of these hegemonies power in perspective while at the same time considering the repurposing of their messages by fans which is described by audience studies scholars (Hills, 2002; Jenkins,…
Issue 08 – Gaming Networks
‘It is increasingly difficult to think of cultural formations as distinct entities because of our awareness of the increased interconnectedness of our communication systems’, writes Tiziana Terranova in her 2004 book Network Cultures, and nowhere is this felt more acutely than in the domain of computer games. Phenomena such as Pokémon, which sweep the entire planet, employ a multitude of media channels to plant their memes in the brains of millions, and erect merchandising empires of unprecedented magnitude, are only the most visible symptoms of this development. Massively multi-player online games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft bind players together in social networks that span the globe, and extend well beyond the realm of the virtual. In part, this is because gaming has become an increasingly online phenomenon, and technological developments bear witness to this fact: for the new generation of game consoles, including Xbox 360, Wii, and PlayStation 3,…
FCJ-047 Intimate Transactions: The Evolution of an Ecosophical Networked Practice
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 Intimate Transactions for one week at ACMI commencing April 25. The two participants, one at the ACMI Screen Pit in Melbourne, and the other 1700 km away at the Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Precinct in Brisbane, will enter a space at each location that is equipped with a touch sensitive physical interface called a Bodyshelf, embedded with sensors that detect body movement and shifting of body weight. Before getting on to the Bodyshelf, each participant puts on a wearable device that passes gentle vibrations into their stomachs, enabling them to sense vibrations of…
FCJ-046 Entropy And Digital Installation
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 had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless, ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre … Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing. (Calvino, 1997: 5-6) Since, ordinarily, channels have a certain amount of noise, and therefore a finite capacity, exact transmission is impossible. (Shannon, 1948: 48) What would it mean if communication were exact? That, in spite…
FCJ-040 Theses on Distributed Aesthetics. Or, What a Network is Not
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 media are increasingly distributed media and they require a rethink of aesthetics beyond the twinned concepts of form and medium that continue to shape analysis of the social and the aesthetic.[1] They require a distributed aesthetics. Distributed aesthetics must deal simultaneously with the dispersed and the situated, with asynchronous production and multi-user access to artifacts (both material and immaterial) on the one hand, and the highly individuated and dispensed allotment of information/media, on the other. The aesthetics of distributed media, practices and experience cannot be located in the formal principles of their dispersal. This provides…
FCJ-039 tsk tsk tsk & beyond: anticipating distributed aesthetics
& 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 think about aesthetic practices generally. The have been especially pivotal in drawing attention to the possibility of different conceptions of participation, of different relations between art work and audience. Online forms of distribution, exhibition and interaction, such as net art and collaborative multi-user environments, are important in that it they have modified the spatial and temporal dimensions of what constitutes an art event and an experience of it. They have been particularly affective in temporal and differential terms, in that the diffusion of location, of both art work and participant, has multiplied the indeterminacy of…
Issue 07 – Distributed Aesthetics
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 bioart. It is clear that computational culture is drifting, fragmenting and laterally expanding: terminals are no longer dedicated; cultural producers are now recurrent and mobile multi-taskers; art is online, on the street, on a screen and coming at you from a million different places, now. Rather than try to define the terminology or taxonomy of distributed art theories and practices we have proposed instead a descriptor for the ‘aesthesia’ of contemporary networked encounters. Distributed aesthetics, then, concerns experiences that are sensed, lived and produced in more than one place and time. This might equally be…
FCJ-038 Women’s Creation of Camera Phone Culture
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 reconstructed people’s everyday experiences. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the number of mobile phone users in South Korea grew rapidly. As the information and communication technology sector has been promoted as the nation’s new growth engine during this period, South Korea has become a global trendsetter, with one of the world’s highest mobile phone penetration rates and competitive infrastructure. By 2004, 36.1 million people out of Korea’s total 48 million population carried one or more mobile handsets, meaning that more than 75% of the total population had taken advantage of mobile phone technology….
FCJ-037 Cute Boys or Game Boys? The Embodiment of Femininity and Masculinity in Young Norwegians’ Text Message Love-Projects
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 the idea that ‘friends will whisper their secrets over the electric wire’ (in Due, 2003 [Kingsbury, 1915: 32]).[1] However, as Beathe Due (2003) notes in her compelling analysis of gender-discourses and telephone-usage in Norway, because of already existing social, cultural and economical bourgeois etiquettes, these discourses were transferred into perceptions of correct usage of the telephone by those who could afford to use and own a telephone. Brief and formal business-related conversations were soon initiated by the bourgeois class. (see also Martin, 1991) In the wake of these etiquettes, a gender-dichotomised discourse of telephone-usage became…
FCJ-036 From Stabilitas Loci to Mobilitas Loci: Networked Mobility and the Transformation of Place
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 said to be left behind or reduced to the status of metaphor. Yet, place is a resilient notion and persists in the face of all these continuing challenges. But what relevance, if any, does place have in the context of networked mobility? Does mobility render notions of place obsolete? Or does place persist? And if the latter, what happens to the common conception of place as a ‘proper, stable, and distinct location’ (Morse, 1999: 195) as a result of mobile practices? This paper responds directly to these questions. It examines the notion of place in…
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