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: Implication of online voting in the future


hi marc and dyske,
i think marc's comments about the personal stake in
"political" expression is a necessary component to all
of this. the non-rational desires behind political
decisions must be taken into account, especially if
we're talking about expanding the base for democratic
decision making.
and if protests are merely PR, than that is what the
political sphere has become - something that i think
may go along with a mediated democratic system.
notions of similacra aside, is/was there ever a form
of unmediated civic life?
the notion that demonstrations would become obsolete
if onine, direct voting was possible, is kinda scary!
the idea of a political process so dependent on an
infrastructure as questionable as the Internet... i
don't know. but i guess we're not really talking about
that, but rather of supplementary activities. either
way, there would have to be much more transparency and
equity in politics than we currently have in the US.
best, ryan

> In the end, mass protests are publicity stunts (or
> "propaganda > game") to psychologically pressure
> politicians and those with opposing > views.
>
> - this may be true to those who organize it and
> those who are much involved iin the media, but to
> many it was a place to declare their emotional
> frustation also. Let's not forget that there other
> things at play here...
>
> And, they too rely on mass media for their
> activities to be
> > effective, the very institutions many activists
> criticize for being biased,
> > sensational, or manipulative.
>
> True again, to a point. Yet when all you've got is
> the galdiator's arena to survive in, you become a
> gladiator. There has been no official platform for
> debate around what has been happening, these marches
> are a very natural outcome of millions of people's
> frustations that they are being lied to all the time
> via handed down default and pompus rank-pulling.
>
> So there are many more factors happening in such
> marches that relate to people in a personal way,
> other than the obvious 'method', propoganda. The
> stage we all stand on can only hold so many...so
> like you are advocating, creating another place for
> such a palce is essential.

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DISCUSSION

Re: Implication of online voting in the future


Hi,

> "The democracies of the city-states of classical
> Greece and of Rome during
> the early years of the Republic were unlike the
> democracies of today. They
> were direct democracies, in which all citizens could
> speak and vote in
> assemblies that resembled New England town meetings.

these "direct democracies" also functioned in the way
that Samuel Huntington views democracy - as something
necessarily needing control over who consititutes a
"citizen." Both the historical examples relied on a
class-like system that denied the civic presence of
certain people, whether women, slaves, etc. the
process could be (and is) said to function very
similarly now in the US, only it's not opaque.

> There are good reasons to protect the government
> from ill-informed voters,
> especially when it comes to specific issues.

i kinda ambivalent on this. while i think many people
are ill informed about many crucial issues, an
unstable situation has to be more democratic - why not
let things get really chaotic? on the other hand, the
"freedom" that i think many libertarians, anarchists,
and "natural law" proponents rhetorically speak of are
based on social darwinian pronciples that are far from
"natural" and emancipatory. for example if the ayn
rand libertarian dream came true, i think things would
move from "free markets" to military totalitarianism
real quick, once it became a "survival of the fittest"
scenario with the "fittest" being those with the most
weapons. this is a sci-fi kind of myth, but it does
happen on micro scales all the time. (the reaction by
"free marketers" after the 92 LA riots is a good case
study)
i think your point about online voting "weeding" out
the uninterested/uninformed seems to make sense. but
then, how does that change anything? as vijay
suggested, does this lead to the elimination of the
need for officials, and their replacement with policy
technicians that just carry out the orders of the
"people"? with the trajectory that media has been
following, there would be a danger of essentializing
the political process - i.e. the majority rule could
easily follow social darwinist ideology, with few ways
to challenge it. how do you protest the "will of the
people," without creating civil war?
or does it pretty much leave the system in tact, but
create an even more manageable civic body as a
technocracy (a new way to regulate citizenship)?
thanks for sharing your research! some very
interesting concepts to mull over...
ryan

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DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

news from isreal/palestine


Rocket retaliation for Gaza deaths
Palestinian militants have fired rockets on a southern
Israeli town in an apparent retaliation for an
overnight raid in Gaza City which left 11 Palestinians
dead.

At least three Qassam rockets were fired at Sderot,
one injuring a 35-year-old Israeli civilian.

The rocket attack was the first on Israeli territory
for about three weeks.

Correspondents say many Palestinians see recent
Israeli raids as a precursor to a full Israeli
takeover of Gaza - a move the Israeli defence minister
has said is being considered.

Frequent target

One of the rockets landed a metre from a factory
entrance in the town's industrial zone, wounding a
worker standing there, an Israeli official said.

He said the other rockets caused light property
damage.

The Sderot area, which is on the edge of Israel's
Negev desert, has been repeatedly hit by Qassam
rockets fired by members of the Islamic militant group
Hamas in a 29-month-old Palestinian uprising against
Israeli occupation.

But the attacks stopped in late January when
Palestinian police began to crack down on Qassam
squads whose actions had provoked punishing Israeli
army incursions.

Car blast

Violence also continued in the West Bank on Wednesday.

Two Palestinians were shot dead in Nablus, as Israeli
troops conducted house-to house searches and reimposed
a curfew in the city's old centre, Palestinian
witnesses said.

And in Jenin, a militant from the al-Aqsa Martyrs
Brigades was killed when his car blew up, Palestinian
security officials said.

Three other people were hurt in the blast, which the
officials blamed on the Israeli army.

The Israeli army said it launched the latest operation
in Gaza following the deaths of four soldiers, whose
tank was blown up by the Islamic militant group Hamas
on Saturday.

Metal workshops

The incursion involved at least 30 tanks, backed by
helicopters, sweeping into the Shajaiyeh and Tufah
districts - known strongholds of Palestinian militants
- after nightfall on Tuesday.

Up to four metal workshops - said by Israel to have
been used by Palestinians to manufacture rockets -
were destroyed by troops accompanied by bulldozers.

Hamas said one its members blew himself up in front of
a tank, but the Israeli army said the man probably
died when a shoulder-launched missile he was aiming at
the tank went off prematurely.

The Israeli army said its troops suffered no
casualties.

The incursion was the bloodiest since 12 Palestinians
died in an Israeli raid on Gaza City on 26 January.

Eight senior Hamas officials have died in Gaza since
Sunday, six of whom were killed in a blast and two
shot dead by Israeli forces.

The violence came after a day of talks in London where
mediators from the US, the European Union, Russia and
the UN met Israeli and Palestinian delegations to
discuss a "road map" for Middle East peace.

The UK has been pressing for quick progress on the
issue to send a signal to the Arab world that
international interest in Middle East peace talks was
not diminishing.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/2778583.stm

Published: 2003/02/19 15:43:37


DISCUSSION

Silicon Shame


http://elandar.com/toxics/stories/sv_toc.html
a documentary site investigating the labor and
ecological situation of micro-electronics production
in the SW US. From El Andar Magazine.
Came across this in some research and thought some
people might be interested.
best,
ryan

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