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: both ways? nike+batman


On Aug 19, 2005, at 10:22 AM, Plasma Studii wrote:

> "intellectual property" is just silly. no matter who claims it.
>
> dumb dc comics ...
>> http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/08/artnet_news_aug.html
>
> ... = dumb rock star
>> http://www.emergentbehaviour.org/?p7

not that it matters, but for Dischord it's not an IP issue but a
branding issue. for their audience, any link to Nike is kind of a
problem. which the smarter than average folks at Nike figured out after
a few hundred emails (see their apology:
http://www.nike.com/nikeskateboarding/v2/main.html ). and to say IP is
silly is to minimize the potential and real economic imbalance that
gives incentives to large corps that can take (and actually copyright
themselves) the work of others to sell stuff. sure, you can say, "well
they shouldn't be able to claim ownership of anything either," but that
would just be ignoring the current reality that is not going to
evaporate anytime soon. Monsanto is winning legal cases where their
product is contaminating other farmers' fields, mandating that those
farmers have to buy the trademarked seed now, for God's sake.
Ian MacKaye has gone on record (in a couple of recent interviews)
saying that he doesn't usually go through the courts to resolve such
conflicts. and it seems to be a more effective and less expensive
approach. doesn't sound too dumb to me.

DISCUSSION

Fwd: Microcosm Update for August!


Begin forwarded message:
>
>
> Microcosm Publishing Update 8/14/5 Newsletter #59
>
> Hello,
> We are almost on a regular schedule of sending out one e-mail update
> per year! I


DISCUSSION

Re: R2D2: Conceptual Art


On Aug 16, 2005, at 1:05 AM, Eric Dymond wrote:

> ryan griffis wrote:
> but Ryan, don't you think that Kuspitt( who's earlier writings I read
> carefully and enjoyed) was trying to align himself, and his
> endorsements, with the "NEW", but his failed critical position was
> attempting to take advantage of the very nomadic culture that we have
> created? Why do I need his valdation?

oh yeah, don't get me wrong... i'm not saying that you or any of us
here need Kuspit's validation. i guess that's what i'm getting at, that
even looking at his sudden interest as conferring any kind of authority
might be counterproductive. my own position is one of disinterest. like
you, i find some of his early writing really useful, and think that he
lost me way before his interest in anything digital. i saw him give a
talk on Louise Bourgeois that was downright painful. i don't know what
his motivations are, and i don't think it matters much either. i can't
imaging that he _needs_ to align himself with anything. i imagine he
does what interests him (and those who read his stuff still).

> Perhaps it has come as a shock to the New York Intellegentstia that we
> have gone back overseas and to the West Coast (Howard Rheingold and
> the EEF) for our inspiration. Shame..., shame on us all. Reminds me of
> an old minimalist article on east coast/west coast..., but who cares
> what coast you are now nearest too?

speaking of Smithson... did you ever see that video he and Nancy Holt
made about East Coast vs West Coast artists. Pretty funny. much more so
than the infamous Robert Irwin - Frank Stella conversation. If only
Tupac and Biggie could have laughed at themselves like that. ;)
anyway... speaking of coasts, what about the coast in the middle (the
Great Lakes)? as a recent LA expat and regularly nomadic person, i can
say nomadism is way over romanticized.

DISCUSSION

stunning


Begin forwarded message:

> New Scientist
> US shoots ahead in stun gun design
> 13 August 2005
> David Hambling
>
>
> Weapons designed to fire "electric bullets" into crowds are being
> developed
> for
> police and border protection agencies in the US.
>
> The Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, the domestic
> equivalent of the defence agency DARPA, has launched an "innovative
> less-lethal devices for law enforcement" programme to radically expand
> the
> capabilities of electric shock weapons.
>
> Existing stun weapons, such as the Taser, typically fire a pair of
> darts
> trailing current-carrying wires to shock the target, with a maximum
> range of
> about 7 metres. The HSARPA programme aims to develop wireless weapons
> that
> can be used over greater distances in spaces such as "an auditorium, a
> city
> street or a sports stadium".
>
> Lynntech of College Station, Texas, is developing a projectile that
> can be
> fired from a shotgun or 40-millimetre grenade launcher. Grenade
> launchers
> are already used by riot police to fire tear gas and baton rounds. On
> impact, the device sticks to the target and delivers an 80,000-volt
> shock
> for 7 seconds, using a pulsed delivery similar to that used by Tasers.
> Further shocks can be triggered via remote control.
>
> Brian Hennings, system integration group leader at Lynntech, would not
> reveal how the projectile sticks to the person, although other weapons
> designed to adhere often use hooks or barbs. "The biggest problem was
> making
> the device non-lethal at minimum range, yet effective at maximum
> range," he
> says.
>
> Hennings claims Lynntech has solved this by ensuring that its round's
> kinetic energy is low enough to meet the safety requirement at close
> range.
> As the projectile does not rely on impact with the body to
> incapacitate the
> person, it does not need to be fired at very high velocity. The
> weapon's
> maximum range is measured in tens of metres, the company says.
>
> Meanwhile, Mide Technology Corporation of Medford, Massachusetts, is
> proposing the Piezer. Rather than conventional stun-gun circuitry, with
> batteries linked to transformers and a capacitor, the Piezer contains
> piezoelectric crystals, which produce a voltage when they are
> compressed.
> The Piezer would be fired from a 12-gauge shotgun, stunning the target
> with
> an electric shock on impact. Shotguns are already used to fire
> less-lethal
> "beanbag" rounds to subdue suspects, but these have short range. Mide
> claims
> the Piezer could be effective at 40 to 50 metres.
>
> Using a different principle again is the Inertial Capacitive
> Incapacitator
> (ICI) being developed by the Physical Optics Corporation of Torrance,
> California. It uses a thin-film charge storage device that is charged
> during
> manufacture and only discharges when it strikes the target. It can be
> incorporated into a ring-shaped aerofoil that can be fired from a
> standard
> grenade launcher at low velocity, while still maintaining a flat
> trajectory
> for maximum accuracy. The company claims this should reduce the impact
> force.
>
> The first prototypes are expected to be delivered to HSARPA by the end
> of
> the year. But Tobias Feakin of the Non-lethal Weapons Research Project
> at
> the University of Bradford in the UK warns that manufacturers' claims
> should
> not be taken at face value. "Without thorough independent testing we
> cannot
> ascertain their usefulness, effectiveness or safety," he says.
>
>> From issue 2512 of New Scientist magazine, 13 August 2005, page 30