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

CAN'T SEE THE TERRORIST FOR THE TREES


another non-net/art post. but holy crap!

> CAN'T SEE THE TERRORIST FOR THE TREES
>
> Not content to let timber companies chop down trees
in the name of fire prevention, the Bush
administration now has a new rationale for
clear-cutting in national forests: preventing
terrorism. According to the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security, overgrown forests could be used as
hiding places for terrorist cells planning attacks on
U.S. cities and civilian populations. The department
has proposed creating tree-free "clearance zones" of
at least five miles around major population centers
and reducing the acreage of dense, overgrown forests
on federal lands by at least two-thirds by 2007. The
administration is also considering transferring
control over parts of the national forest and park
systems to Homeland Security agencies, and replacing
trained foresters with
"security rangers" who would cruise forests looking
for suspicious activities. Enviros expressed outrage
that the administration would use fears of terrorism
as an excuse to open up national forests to more
logging.
>
> straight to the source: Denver Post, Alexander
Harris, 01 Apr 2003
>
<http://www.gristmagazine.com/forward.pl?forward_id

DISCUSSION

anti-protest legislation


How many people have been injured BY protestors? how
many protestors have been injured? Don't you like when
authorities belittle social movements (called critical
mass "little bike rides") while calling for urgent
means to stop them?
and if your looking for the connection to the Net,
this legislation and hearing use similar language as
that being created around DDOS attacks and other forms
of ECD.
best,
ryan

INSIDE THE CAPITOL

03/24/03
HARRY ESTEVE

SALEM -- The harshest critics of the war protests in
downtown Portland angrily called the demonstrators
"terrorists" and wished aloud that the police and
courts would treat them as such.

This morning, that idea gets put to the test at the
Oregon Legislature, where a ranking senator has
introduced a bill to "create the crime of terrorism"
and apply it to people who intentionally cause injury
while disrupting commerce or traffic.

If convicted, they would face imprisonment for life.

Senate Bill 742 is the brainchild of Sen. John Minnis,
R-Wood Village, a Portland police detective who also
serves as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
It's scheduled for a hearing in his committee
beginning at 8 a.m.

The proposal already has come under heavy attack from
the American Civil Liberties Union, antiwar activists
and some of Minnis' colleagues in the Senate. But the
longtime lawmaker offers a laconic grin about
accusations that he's shredding the Constitution to
make a point about protesters.

"It's going to be a fascinating hearing," he says.

Minnis, on the defensive after the first draft of his
bill made it sound as if the average Critical Mass
cyclist would wind up spending life behind bars, says
it was written too hurriedly. Recently drafted
amendments narrow the bill so it isn't so draconian,
he says.

"People in their little bike rides don't apply," he
says. But if they do something intentionally to injure
or kill someone while they're demonstrating, they
could be tried as terrorists.

Minnis says he borrowed language from Oregon's treason
statutes, and meant the bill as an "umbrella" law
covering all types of terrorism, including
eco-sabotage. The bill certainly would apply to
someone caught spiking trees to prevent logging, he
says.

The bill is the most visceral legislative response to
the events of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. It comes at
a time when cities around the nation are dealing with
increasingly large and confrontational antiwar rallies
stemming from the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Other states are taking similar action in an effort to
crack down on what some fear may be a wave of
terrorist acts in response to the Iraq war. The
Washington House last week passed a bill creating six
new terrorism-related crimes, including possession of
weapons of mass destruction, making terrorist threats
and providing material support to terrorists.

But Minnis' bill stands out in that it appears to
target domestic protesters who go beyond marching in
the streets. It also includes language that would
require police to cooperate with federal antiterror
investigators and would allow indefinite
record-keeping on suspects.

Those are the aspects that caught the attention of the
ACLU. The initial bill was "ludicrous," said David
Fidanque, executive director of the ACLU of Oregon.
The amended version isn't much better, he says.

"We think this bill is a much graver threat to the
freedoms that all Oregonians hold dear than is created
by any terrorist," Fidanque says. "It will do nothing
to make us safer, and would do a lot to undermine our
constitutional rights."

Martin Gonzales, who helped organize one of the
Portland peace rallies last week, said Minnis'
proposal is a huge overreaction to a phantom problem.

"More and more, the notion in this country that any
act of protest, particularly in time of war, is seen
as unpatriotic," says Gonzales, who is with the
American Friends Service Committee, an activist
organization dedicated to peace. Demonstrators block
traffic and "disrupt commerce," Gonzales says to make
a basic point:

"We can't continue to have business as usual. How can
we go on about our lives, our business, when our
government is inflicting pain, inflicting death on
other people in the world?"

Minnis insists he supports the right of people to
protest peacefully. But if they get violent and
disruptive, "They don't get a pass from me." Harry
Esteve: 503-221-8234; harryesteve@news.oregonian.com

Copyright 2003 Oregon Live. All Rights Reserved.

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DISCUSSION

Contextin' Art Correct link!


April fools.
Sorry for the link misfire on the press release!
(Thanks to Curt for the notification)

http://www.artofficial-online.com/contextin/spring03

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DISCUSSION

Contextin' Art Spring issue launched


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

1 April 2003

Contextin

DISCUSSION

Re: political gaming


> the politicisation of aesthetics already assumes an unpolitical aesthetics in it's "natural" state, realist or not, doesn't it?
that to me was always the dialectical problem for Adorno in his "commitment" argument. even though he argued for an autonomous (from politics) culture, it seemed (to me) that he recognized the impossibility of asserting an apolitical autonomy for culture.
i read Fahey's statement as one acknowleding politics as inherent in social structure, something that you cannot get "away from."
It always seemed to me that attempts to depoliticize social life (and culture) was an authoritarian means of killing civic debate. but i realize that's probably due to US history and the trend to drive citizens away from civic life, making us think that our(US citizens) lives are apolitical, and that "politics" is a nasty game of compromise. and compromise is decidedly "unAmerican."
best,
ryan