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 ...
SWITCH: Issue 22
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 ...
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.
[-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.state of the planet infographics
a small collection of beautiful information graphics documenting the current state of the planet.
see also gapminder & 3d data globe.
[seedmagazine.com]
Re: vaya con dios
association: your use of "go with god" in a sarcastic manner and naming
a dog that has many associations with security and threatening posture
with the same phrase. i guess i found it kind of funny, but not really
critical commentary.
barking and biting? really?
face to face? man to man, is that it? right in front of the list? hold
on, let me get my brass knuckles.
i don't get all the tough guy posturing. or maybe this is a misreading?
or maybe this is more deliberate provocation?
MANIK's criticisms work much better when they're not surrounded by such
rhetoric. conversation is easily diverted into oneupsmanship and
showing off, especially in list culture.
of course, that's just my opinion, and as we've already established,
i'm an idiot.
On Feb 8, 2006, at 8:47 PM, manik wrote:
> I don't know Ryan...Why don't you see what B92 have to say?Are you
> still idiot?
> I avoid idiots after they show
Vaya Con Dios
http://www.dobermannreview.co.yu/kennels/Tanderberg/dog/
Vaya%20Con%20Dios%20of%20Tanderberg%202.jpg
On Feb 8, 2006, at 5:30 PM, manik wrote:
> Vaya con Dios
>
Re: isabelle dinoire
off the mark...
i could, very likely, be totally wrong, but it sounds like people are
more concerned with the responsibility of affect + representation?
when someone says "linkoln has cut her vocal chords..." that has to be
taken as a statement about representation. we're not talking about
Santiago Sierra after all.
both the original video and linkoln's mod are tools for affect, no? is
the question about which one is more manipulative (i.e. less
transparent)? which one is more oppressive/repressive to the
objectified (and, i guess, by extension, us)?
i think the critiques of the vid make some good points...
all of this kind of reminds me of the news i've been listening to all
day regarding the controversial danish cartoons... many journalists are
saying they understand the "free speech" rights of the publishers, but
such rights don't negate responsibility or create obligations. "just
because they can" isn't justification. that point can def be translated
into remix culture... is a remix liberating just by nature?
On Feb 7, 2006, at 4:44 PM, Turbulence.org wrote:
> Two human faces, side by side, stretched taught as a drum, manipulated
> and toyed with (much like a cat toys with a mouse before he kills it).
> As if this is not monstrous enough, Linkoln has cut her vocal chords,
> silenced her, period.
>
> Truth?
>
> The artist's?
> The subject's?
> Mine?
>
> Jo
Re: isabelle dinoire
not at all... if that's "bitchy" - bitch on. (not that my "permission"
is needed, of course!)
humanism, after all, has as much room to criticize anti-humanism (not
to mention post-humanism) as the other way around. especially now.
>
> I was profoundly shocked yesterday when I saw this woman, being glad
> with a face I thought ugly monstruous. (but she came from no face at
> all, no control at all over her mouth muscles, so indeed what a gain)
> I cannot look at a media image as an image or as a narration.
> I see and feel reality behind.
> (but not truth)
>
> best
> annie
>
Re: isabelle dinoire
> years ago I was doing some work with some theater people. I had all
> sorts of ideas, wanted to set up some sensors and use them to trigger
> lighting etc. The theater people looked at me and said, "Why?" We can
> just fake it. We can make it "look" like the actors are controlling
> the lights, and it dawned on me that theater is an art of lies and
> fakery whereas (I think) conceptually grounded visual arts are an art
> of truth.
this is an interesting thread...
to take up Pall's points, which bring up some great things to discuss:
how does work like Walid Raad/Atlas Project's generate a response in
relation to truth/fabrication? One could say the there are "give aways"
to the work's fabricated elements, but i think that all depends on the
audience. Those "in the know" know...
Or how about the Center for Tactical Magic? or CAE? or the Yes Men?
Part of the effect and affect of the work is that momentary (or for
some, sustained) suspension of disbelief. (or maybe more accurately,
suspension of relief!)
Going back a bit historically for this discussion, Alan Sekula's
critique of documentary and photography are interesting to consider.
This statement is particularly relevant here:
"What I am arguing is that we understand the extent to which art
redeems a repressive social order by offering a wholly imaginary
transcendence, a false harmony, to docile and isolated spectators."
(from "Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary" 1976/8) Sekula
goes on however to argue that a new kind of documentary is needed, from
his very Marxist position, that is critical of the "objectivity of the
camera" while recreating a kind of socialist realism.
To update that, Nato Thompson (MassMoCA curator of "The
Interventionists") has been working with people like CAE, CTM, CLUI,
Speculative Archive, Trevor Paglen, etc) and compiled a small article +
series of works for Art Journal last year, prefacing the works with
this statement:
"What unifies their individual approaches is a shared attempt to deploy
the aesthetics of truth in order to raise criticality. By aesthetics of
truth, I mean an intellectual manipulation of visual codes that signify
a truth claim. To be clear about what this entails, examples might
include videotaped confessions, textbook-inspired design strategies,
and experimental lectures in which claims are asserted that are, in
fact, inaccurate, if not flagrantly false. Yet these projects do not
simply manipulate the visuality of what may lead us to accept them as
truth but, more important, they use this method critically to raise
concrete historical issues. Their work is not simply sign play. The
subjects of the individual projects range from Ninjitsu to beekeeping
to the prison industry to the United States--backed coup in Chile."
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_1_63/ai_114632849/
pg_1
i don't think i would have arrived at this discussion so much from
abe's video on my own... it just doesn't push those same buttons for
me. i have a similar reaction to it as Marisa expressed. i read it as a
response to the immediacy of the media image (document) that is already
read through other narratives (sci-fi, "Face Off," etc). it doesn't
challenge the dominant narrative (as "truth") as much as show how
problematic and discursive that narrative already is.