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 ...

READ ON »


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 ...

READ ON »


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.

READ ON »


[-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.

READ ON »


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]

READ ON »



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

Fwd: IMC Italy under attack, again


Begin forwarded message:

> At the moment, Indymedia Italy site can be accessed, no matter the
> attack
> ([0]DDOS) that's targetting the server since May 1st, no matter the
> press
> agencies claiming the site has already been seized. Again. Few months
> have passed since [1]FBI seized the hard disks of the server that
> hosted
> IMC Italy, and on the same day that the high court declared that crimes
> against catholic religion are punishable no more than crimes against
> other religions are, a zealous public prosecutor from Rome, Salvatore
> Vitello, charges Indymedia Italy with the crimes of offence to catholic
> religion and personal offences to the Pope, asking for the shutdown of
> the IMC.
>
> This story continues at:
> http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid/05/05/1434238

DISCUSSION

Robertson: judges worse than 9/11 terrorists


http://mediamatters.org/items/200505020003
On ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Pat Robertson, founder
of Christian Coalition of America and host of the Christian
Broadcasting Network's The 700 Club, defended his comments in his
latest book, Courting Disaster, that Democratic judicial appointments
are the most serious threat America has faced in nearly 400 years.
Robertson also recently announced that God told him, "I will remove
judges from the Supreme Court quickly, and their successors will refuse
to sanction the attacks on religious faith."

From the May 1 broadcast of This Week:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But, sir, you have described this in pretty -- this
whole battle in pretty apocalyptic terms. You've said that liberals are
engaged in an all-out assault on Christianity, that Democrats will
appoint judges who don't share our Christian values and will dismantle
Christian culture. And that the out-of-control judiciary -- and this
was in your last book, Courting Disaster -- is the most serious threat
America has faced in nearly 400 years of history, more serious than Al
Qaeda, more serious than Nazi Germany and Japan, more serious than the
Civil War?

ROBERTSON: George, I really believe that. I think they are destroying
the fabric that holds our nation together. There is an assault on
marriage. There's an assault on human sexuality, as [U.S. Supreme
Court] Judge [Antonin] Scalia said, they've taken sides in the culture
war. And on top of that, if we have a democracy, the democratic
processes should be that we can elect representatives who will share
our point of view and vote those things into law.

DISCUSSION

Re: Life Gem


On May 4, 2005, at 2:13 PM, Patrick Lichty wrote:

> These have been out 2-3 years.
> Thought I'd have my wife made into one of these.
> After she passed on, of course...

sounds like a plan...
what a nifty second-engagement ring that could be:
"will you take this ring, made of my previous spouse, and marry me?
What? No... i wouldn't do that to YOU!

DISCUSSION

Life Gem


http://www.lifegem.com/
just came across this in an article in Cabinet...
if i had come across this without the article, i would have thought it was a parody.
definitely check out the "for pets" option.

DISCUSSION

Re: Fwd: [biodev0506] announcing activista (radical search engine)


interesting crit - i'm sure the folks at protest.net, et al who created
this would be interested to hear it.

On May 4, 2005, at 4:37 AM, Andres Manniste wrote:

> ryan griffis FORWARDED:
>
> Activista? Because recipes are yummy!
>
>
> One would think that an alternative search engine would come up with
> an alternative name. The reference to Altavista is a bit of an
> acceptance that your definition of alternate occurs within the shadow
> of a determining model, which in your case seems to be loosely based
> on the North American one. (My jeans are torn to demonstrate to you
> that they are not like your jeans)
>
> The tangent into "yummy recipes" is strange. At the least it really
> focuses on an occidental middle class bias and as such brings into
> question the entire "alternate" premise. How does one describe the
> eating habits of two thirds of the world as alternate? It only makes
> sense within a really minor cultural bubble.