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

Fortunetellers R Us


The Future of the Internet:

In a survey, technology experts and scholars evaluate where the network
is
headed in the next ten years

Susannah Fox, Janna Quitney Anderson, Lee Rainie
Pew Internet & American Life Project 1/9/2005

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/145/report_display.asp

A wide-ranging survey of technology leaders, scholars, industry
officials,
and analysts finds that most internet experts expect attacks on the
network
infrastructure in the coming decade as the internet becomes more
embedded
in everyday and commercial life. They believe the dawning of the blog
era
will bring radical change to the news and publishing industry and they
think the internet will have the least impact on religious institutions.

View PDF of Report
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf
View PDF of Questionnaire
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Experts_future_survey_results.pdf

DISCUSSION

J20 - inaugurationmedia.org


Please forward this along! Inauguration protest information --
January 20th, 2005 J20 - Anti-Inauguration Call-to-Action

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: http://www.inaugurationmedia.org Radio
Coordinator: Selina; 202-250-4939;

sel...@riseup.net Photo and Print Coordinator: Nancy; 202-216-2817;

n...@upcloseandpolitical.com All Other Inquires: Chris; 202-413-2212;

chrisstr...@yahoo.com Allison; 301-949-7639; alli...@amp-photo.net

Independent Media Converges to Cover Bush Inauguration

We are contacting you as an important member of the independent
media community to ask you to participate in, support or promote
independent media coverage of the upcoming presidential inauguration
in January.

From Jan. 10 through Jan. 24, independent media makers will converge
in the nation's capital to provide continuous coverage of the
inauguration through video, photography, radio, print, and web
postings.

We are a group of independent media makers in Washington, DC that
has formed to help facilitate and coordinate coverage of the
inauguration.

For more information, please visit our website at
http://www.inaugurationmedia.org. A list of our needs follows at the end
of this letter, along with information on how to join out listserves.

Information about specific media projects during the inauguration
will be available on our website in the coming weeks.

If you are in the DC area or coming to town for the inauguration,
we ask you to contact us to help coordinate independent media
coverage.

We intend to provide a media workspace with broadband Internet
access, telephones, a limited number of computers for public use
and Internet radio facilities. Although we will appreciate and
request donations for use of the space, no one who legitimately
wants to use the space to create independent media will be turned
away.

If you cannot come to Washington for the inauguration, please help
promote and distribute the independent media that is produced. For
example, post a link to our website on your site.

Repost or re-air content produced during the inauguration. Use
whatever forum you have to discuss and promote the independent media
produced during the inauguration. Share this letter and the existence
of our media center with your readership, listenership, viewership,
fellow journalists, photographers, filmmakers, and writers. Also,
consider sponsoring a trip to Washington for someone else who wishes
to create media.

Finally, we ask everyone to review the list of needs at the end of
this letter and help us however you can.

This year's election was won by a razor thin margin.

Indeed, almost half of those who voted did not vote for Bush. The
same was true of the last election. Despite this, the mainstream
media provided almost no coverage of the protests and general dissent
surrounding the 2000 inauguration. We do not want this situation
to occur again, and we are determined to use our voices and the
voices of others around the world to ensure that independent messages
are heard.

The success of delivering these messages depends upon how much unity
we can create in the world of independent media. One person acting
alone is one voice. Acting together, we are many voices, and can
pool our resources to rise above the din of the mainstream media.
With your assistance, we can ensure that the voice of independent
media is heard loud and clear.

Thank you for any support you can offer us.

DC Inauguration Media Group

ABOUT US:

We are a not-for-profit coalition of independent media makers working
on an entirely volunteer basis. Any money we receive in the form
of contributions will go directly towards supporting the creation
and distribution of independent media. A list of participants is
available on our website, http://www.inaugurationmedia.org.

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

20 amazing facts...


20 Amazing Facts about Voting in the USA

Did you know....?

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies:
Diebold
and ES&S.
[0]Evoting
[1]Diebold

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of
the U.S. voting machine industry.
[2]Common Dreams
[0]Evoting

3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
[3]Company
[0]Landes

This story continues at:
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid/01/15/1755201

DISCUSSION

Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer11jan11,0,2627223.story
Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?

Robert Scheer

Los Angeles Times
January 11, 2005

Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by
President Bush as the center of a vast and well-
organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not
exist?

To even raise the question amid all the officially
inspired hysteria is heretical, especially in the
context of the U.S. media's supine acceptance of
administration claims relating to national security.
Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of
Britain's leading documentary filmmakers systematically
challenges this and many other accepted articles of
faith in the so-called war on terror.

"The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of
Fear," a three-hour historical film by Adam Curtis
recently aired by the British Broadcasting Corp.,
argues coherently that much of what we have been told
about the threat of international terrorism "is a
fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by
politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread
unquestioned through governments around the world, the
security services and the international media."

Stern stuff, indeed. But consider just a few of the
many questions the program poses along the way:

* If Osama bin Laden does, in fact, head a vast
international terrorist organization with trained
operatives in more than 40 countries, as claimed by
Bush, why, despite torture of prisoners, has this
administration failed to produce hard evidence of it?

* How can it be that in Britain since 9/11, 664 people
have been detained on suspicion of terrorism but only
17 have been found guilty, most of them with no
connection to Islamist groups and none who were proven
members of Al Qaeda?

* Why have we heard so much frightening talk about
"dirty bombs" when experts say it is panic rather than
radioactivity that would kill people?

* Why did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claim on
"Meet the Press" in 2001 that Al Qaeda controlled
massive high-tech cave complexes in Afghanistan, when
British and U.S. military forces later found no such
thing?

Of course, the documentary does not doubt that an
embittered, well-connected and wealthy Saudi man named
Osama bin Laden helped finance various affinity groups
of Islamist fanatics that have engaged in terror,
including the 9/11 attacks. Nor does it challenge the
notion that a terrifying version of fundamentalist
Islam has led to gruesome spates of violence throughout
the world. But the film, both more sober and more
deeply provocative than Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit
9/11," directly challenges the conventional wisdom by
making a powerful case that the Bush administration,
led by a tight-knit cabal of Machiavellian
neoconservatives, has seized upon the false image of a
unified international terrorist threat to replace the
expired Soviet empire in order to push a political
agenda.

Terrorism is deeply threatening, but it appears to be a
much more fragmented and complex phenomenon than the
octopus-network image of Al Qaeda, with Bin Laden as
its head, would suggest.

While the BBC documentary acknowledges that the threat
of terrorism is both real and growing, it disagrees
that the threat is centralized:

"There are dangerous and fanatical individuals and
groups around the world who have been inspired by
extreme Islamist ideas and who will use the techniques
of mass terror -- the attacks on America and Madrid
make this only too clear. But the nightmare vision of a
uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike
our societies is an illusion. Wherever one looks for
this Al Qaeda organization, from the mountains of
Afghanistan to the 'sleeper cells' in America, the
British and Americans are chasing a phantom enemy."

The fact is, despite the efforts of several government
commissions and a vast army of investigators, we still
do not have a credible narrative of a "war on terror"
that is being fought in the shadows.

Consider, for example, that neither the 9/11 commission
nor any court of law has been able to directly take
evidence from the key post-9/11 terror detainees held
by the United States. Everything we know comes from two
sides that both have a great stake in exaggerating the
threat posed by Al Qaeda: the terrorists themselves and
the military and intelligence agencies that have a
vested interest in maintaining the facade of an
overwhelmingly dangerous enemy.

Such a state of national ignorance about an endless war
is, as "The Power of Nightmares" makes clear, simply
unacceptable in a functioning democracy.