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

Re: The Myth of Meritocracy in Fine Arts


i would disagree with Curt about a lot... but i think he's right about relativism here.
if you're wanting to use the surface of the economic system underlying the art trade as the 'real' framework for artistic visibility, you get stuck with "i show this art because it sells well," and you never get to 'why' it sells well. it's circular, and takes classical economics at face value (as if supply and demand are real Natural forces). there are whole bodies of criticism that look at the intersection of subconscious desires and economic rationality to try to make sense of this. there are ways of looking at popularity/success outside of the dualist question of "for love or money?" one might even say that it's more complicated than that - what of Curt's remaining 80%? ;)
the desire to use sales(wo)manship as a benchmark for artistic success is merely a desire to replace one myth of meritocracy with another, i.e. who's a good artist is replaced with who's a good salesperson. and a very social darwinist position, in my estimation. (is there really a need to compete for resources through cultural production? how much can we waste?)
interesting discussion though, and as far as i'm concerned, the more questions the better...
best,
ryan

DISCUSSION

FWD: picturepeople archive


Dear Picturepeople public,

thank you for following the monthly Picturepeople
project, which
started over 2 years ago. Now we
have the pleasure to present an archive of our project
at:

http://www.paetau.com/picturepeople/

The archive now contains all the issues from #00 - #22
and will be
up-dated as time goes by.

The project will go on as usual and you will receive
our monthly mail
with a photoseries per e-mail.
The web-archive is not replacing the initial project,
which attaches
importance to the gesture of
sending / receiving our monthly Picturepeople issue
directly per
e-mail.

Thank you for your kind attention!

Yours, Rudiger Heinze & Kristofer Paetau

--------------------------
PICTUREPEOPLE is an independent artistic (monthly)
e-mail project by
Rudiger Heinze (writer) and
Kristofer Paetau (visual artist) without any
commercial purpose. It
concentrates on the human
representation in (amateur) photography. The (found)
photographs are
part of fictions (due to their
re-contextualisation) and they reveal different
phenomena in human
representation, interrogating
mainly cultural and social issues, making connections
to other fields
of representation. The text
accompanying each series of pictures serves as an
introduction -
hopefully leading to further
reflexions.

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OPPORTUNITY

creative capital grants announcement


Deadline:
Wed Feb 18, 2004 14:44

CREATIVE CAPITAL FOUNDATION GRANTS 2004-05
IN VISUAL ARTS AND FILM/VIDEO

The Creative Capital Foundation is now open for grant
submission!
Inquiry Forms for Visual Arts and Film/Video are now
available online at
http://apply.creative-capital.org, and must be
submitted by March 15,
2004. Those interested in grants for Performing Arts
and Emerging
Fields will be eligible to submit Inquiry Forms in
2005.

Creative Capital's Online Application Advice Chats
will take place in a
chat room on America Online's Instant Messaging
Network. For
information on how to participate in the chat
sessions, visit
http://creative-capital.org/application/chat.html.
This year


DISCUSSION

RE: Report From Transmediale.04: Fly Utopia!


The utopia theme seems to be everywhere... or it's one
of those things where i see something a few times and
start connecting everything to it...
The Venice Biennale's Utopia Station curated by: Molly
Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija
http://www.e-flux.com/projects/utopia/
the "community" category for AE (though it doesn't use
the word 'utopia' it is certainly implied)
http://www.aec.at/en/prix/communities/communities.asp
and i saw a lecture and presentation by Nils Norman
just the other day on his work and the impossibility
of utopia (though his examples could become
conservative defences of the status-quo)
http://www.uks.no/uksforum/arkiv/3499/html/norman.html
it seems like i've seen more, but that's all i can
recall off the top of my head.
anyway, it's an interesting cultural direction given
all that's going on.
it also seems interesting that all the utopianisms
seem associated with notions of 'interconnectivity'
and 'automation' derived from the development of new
protocols with nostalgic ideals - back to Galloway's
essay...
ryan

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DISCUSSION

FWD: CLUI exhibition update


On display in the Los Angeles exhibit space February
06 - 29

A VIEW INTO THE PIPE: East Central Interceptor Sewer

At a construction site a few blocks from the CLUI's
Culver City office,
an excavation in the ground exposes Los Angeles' main
sewer pipe.
Like a surgical incision, this aperture offers a rare
and momentary
look at the city's intestines...

http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/ondisplay/pipe/

-----------------

The CLUI Los Angeles Exhibit Hall is open noon to five
PM,
Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, or by appointment.
Admission is free.

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