ryan griffis
Since 2002
Works in United States of America

ARTBASE (3)
PORTFOLIO (1)
BIO
Ryan Griffis currently teaches new media art at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He often works under the name Temporary Travel Office and collaborates with many other writers, artists, activists and interesting people in the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor.
The Temporary Travel Office produces a variety of services relating to tourism and technology aimed at exploring the non-rational connections existing between public and private spaces. The Travel Office has operated in a variety of locations, including Missouri, Chicago, Southern California and Norway.

Is MySpace a Place?


Networked Performance pointed me toward an interview (download in PDF)with Networked Publics speaker Henry Jenkins and Networked Publics friend danah boyd about Myspace. The site, popular with teenagers, has become increasingly controversial as parents and the press raise concerns about the openness of information on the site and the vulnerability this supposedly poses to predators (Henry points out that only .1% of abductions are by strangers) and the behavior of teens towards each other (certainly nothing new, only now in persistent form). In another essay on Identity Production in Networked Culture, danah suggests that Myspace is popular not only because the technology makes new forms of interaction possible, but because older hang-outs such as the mall and the convenience store are prohibiting teens from congregating and roller rinks and burger joints are disappearing.

This begs the question, is Myspace media or is it space? Architecture theorists have long had this thorn in their side. "This will kill that," wrote Victor Hugo with respect to the book and the building. In the early 1990s, concern about a dwindling public culture and the character of late twentieth century urban space led us to investigate Jürgen Habermas's idea of the public sphere. But the public sphere, for Habermas is a forum, something that, for the most part, emerges in media and in the institutions of the state:

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people's ...

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SWITCH: Issue 22



Carlos Castellanos:

HI everyone. Just wanted to announce the new issue of SWITCH:

SWITCH : The online New Media Art Journal of the CADRE Laboratory for
New Media at San Jose State University

http://switch.sjsu.edu switch@cadre.sjsu.edu

SWITCH Journal is proud to announce the launch of Issue 22: A Special
Preview Edition to ISEA 2006/ ZeroOne San Jose.

As San Jose State University and the CADRE Laboratory are serving as
the academic host for the ZeroOne San Jose /ISEA 2006 Symposium,
SWITCH has dedicated itself to serving as an official media
correspondent of the Festival and Symposium. SWITCH has focused the
past three issues of publication prior to ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006
on publishing content reflecting on the themes of the symposium. Our
editorial staff has interviewed and reported on artists, theorists,
and practitioners interested in the intersections of Art & Technology
as related to the themes of ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA 2006. While some
of those featured in SWITCH are part of the festival and symposium,
others provide a complimentary perspective.

Issue 22 focuses on the intersections of CADRE and ZeroOne San Jose/
ISEA 2006. Over the past year, students at the CADRE Laboratory for
New Media have been working intensely with artists on two different
residency projects for the festival – “Social Networking” with Antoni
Muntadas and the City as Interface Residency, “Karaoke Ice” with
Nancy Nowacek, Marina Zurkow & Katie Salen. Carlos Castellanos,
James Morgan, Aaron Siegel, all give us a sneak preview of their
projects which will be featured at the ISEA 2006 exhibition. Alumni
Sheila Malone introduces ex_XX:: post position, an exhibition
celebrating the 20th anniversary of the CADRE Institute that will run
as a parallel exhibition to ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA 2006. LeE
Montgomery provides a preview of NPR (Neighborhood Public Radio)
presence at ...

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Art & Mapping



The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) has released a special issue of their journal, Cartographic Perspectives:
Art and Mapping Issue 53, Winter 2006 Edited by Denis Wood and and John Krygier Price: $25
The issue includes articles by kanarinka, Denis Wood, Dalia Varanka and John Krygier, and an extensive catalogue of map artists compiled by Denis Wood.

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[-empyre-] Liquid Narrative for June 2006


Christina McPhee:

hi all, I am not sure we got this message out to Rhizome!

Please join our guests this month, Dene Grigar (US), Jim Barrett
(AU/SE), Lucio Santaella (BR), and Sergio Basbaum (BR) , with
moderator Marcus Bastos (BR), for a spirited discussion of "Liquid
Narratives" ----- digital media story telling with a dash, perhaps,
of 'aura' .

Here's the intro from Marcus:

The topic of June at the - empyre - mailing list will be Liquid Narratives. The concept of 'liquid narrative' is interesting in that it allows to think about the unfoldings of contemporary languages beyond tech achievements, by relating user controlled applications with formats such as the essay (as described by Adorno in "Der Essay als Form", The essay as a form) and procedures related to the figure of the narrator (as described by Benjamin in his writings about Nikolai Leskov). Both authors are accute critics of modern culture, but a lot of his ideas can be expanded towards contemporary culture. As a matter of fact, one of the main concerns in Benjamin's essay is a description of how the rise of modernism happens on account of an increasing nprivilege of information over knowledge, which is even more intense nowadays. To understand this proposal, it is important to remember how Benjamin distinguishes between an oral oriented knowledge, that results from 'an experience that goes from person to person' and is sometimes anonymous, from the information and authoritative oriented print culture. One of the aspects of this discussion is how contemporary networked culture rescues this 'person to person' dimension, given the distributed and non-authoritative procedures that technologies such as the GPS, mobile phones and others stimulate.

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state of the planet infographics


stateoftheplanet.jpg
a small collection of beautiful information graphics documenting the current state of the planet.
see also gapminder & 3d data globe.
[seedmagazine.com]

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Discussions (909) Opportunities (8) Events (16) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

microsoft bans "democracy" from their websites in china


this is a repost from nettime, but i thought some people here would be
interested that aren't on nt.

> http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?
> feed=FT&Date 050610&IDH84671
>
> June 10, 2005 11:42 PM ET
> Microsoft bans 'democracy' for China web users
> Financial Times
>
> Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words
> "democracy" and
> "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid
> offending
> Beijing's political censors.
>
> Users of the joint-venture portal, formally launched last month, have
> been blocked
> from using a range of potentially sensitive words to label personal
> websites they
> create using its free online blog service, MSN Spaces.
>
> Attempts to input words in Chinese such as "democracy" prompted an
> error message
> from the site: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the
> forbidden
> speech from this item." Other phrases banned included the Chinese for
> "demonstration", "democratic movement" and "Taiwan independence".
>
> It was possible to enter such words within blogs created using MSN
> Spaces, but the
> move to block them from the more visible section of the site
> highlights the
> willingness of some foreign internet companies to tailor their
> services to avoid
> upseting China's Communist government.
>
> Beijing has long sought to limit political debate on the internet and
> is in the
> throes of a campaign to force anybody who operates a website to
> register with the
> central government.
>
> MSN this year became the first big international internet service to
> win a licence
> to offer value-added telecoms services in China, a coup that was
> possible in part
> because of its decision to team up in a joint venture with Shanghai
> Alliance
> Investment (Sail). Sail is an investment arm of the Shanghai city
> government.
> Microsoft has also been careful to ensure that news and other content
> offered
> through the Chinese MSN portal are provided by local partners who can
> work within
> the informal and shifting boundaries set by China's unseen army of
> internet
> censors.
>
> The MSN Spaces service, however, is directly operated by the joint
> venture,
> Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, in which Microsoft
> holds a 50 per
> cent stake.
>
> MSN on Friday declined to comment directly on the ban on sensitive
> words, but its
> China joint venture said users of MSN Spaces were required to accept
> the service's
> code of conduct. "MSN abides by the laws and regulations of each
> country in which
> it operates," the joint venture said. The MSN Spaces code of conduct
> forbids the
> posting of content that "violates any local and national laws".
>
> But while China's ruling Communist Party deals harshly with political
> dissenters,
> there is no Chinese law that bars the mere use of words such as
> democracy.



DISCUSSION

Fwd: AUDC Wilshire Boulevard Facility Opening


> AUDC [http://www.audc.org] announces an inaugural reception and
> preview of its Wilshire Boulevard Facility on Friday, June 17, 7-9pm,
> 6128 Wilshire (at Fairfax), Suite 211, Los Angeles.
>
> AUDC's Wilshire Boulevard Facility [http://www.audc-office.com]
> consists of a small, flexible exhibit space and office. During the
> month of June, the Wilshire Boulevard Facility will be open by
> appointment only. We intend to establish regular hours beginning in
> the third week of July.
>
> In June and July, AUDC's Wilshire Boulevard Facility will host an
> interpretive exhibit on "Ether" [http://www.audc.org/ether], analyzing
> the role of the individual, objects, and telecommunicational society
> from the Cold War to the present day. For Ether, AUDC focuses its
> investigation on a building purported to be both the world's most
> connected location and the most expensive space in North America,
> telecom hotel One Wilshire, located in downtown Los Angeles.
>
> In other AUDC news, we recently published "Ether" in Verb: Connections
> [http://www.actar.es] and "Immaterial Culture" in Textfield 3
> [http://www.textfield.org]. "Site:Nonsite:Quartzsite," our
> installation about Quartzsite, Arizona on the web
> [http://www.audc.org/quartzsite] and at the 2004 High Desert Test
> Sites [http://www.highdeserttestsites.com] is part of City/Observer,
> an online exhibition curated by New Museum of Contemporary Art
> associate curator Yukie Kamiya on rhizome.org
> [http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/city/]. Kazys Varnelis also
> lectured on AUDC's work in April at the University of Washington,
> Seattle.
>
> - - - - -
>
> AUDC's goal is to speculatively investigate the contemporary city
> using the tools of the architect, the historian, and the designer.
> AUDC blurs traditional divisions between media by working
> simultaneously in print, web, video, photography, drawings, models,
> dioramas, and installations while addressing the particularities of
> each medium. Likewise, AUDC breaks down the boundaries between theory
> and practice by uniting both scholarship and design research.
>
> AUDC was founded by Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis in 2001.
>
> Robert graduated from SCI_Arc with a Master's in Architecture and
> after practicing as an architect and teaching history and theory of
> architecture, is now a production designer. See
> http://www.robertsumrell.com
>
> Kazys has a Ph.D. from Cornell University and has taught at SCI_Arc
> since 1996. After a semester teaching at the University of
> Pennsylvania this spring, he is Senior Research Associate at the
> Annenberg Center for Communications at the University of Southern
> California during the 2005-2006 academic year, working on his project
> on the Network City. See http://www.varnelis.net
>
> - - - - -

DISCUSSION

Review of "A Walk to Remember"


Review of 'A Walk to Remeber