idc_events

On Rules and Monsters

Free Cooperation: Political Theory for Godzilla & Co.

Video Screening and Discussion (with Christoph Spehr in person!)
Introduction: Trebor Scholz

Friday, March 10 at 8 pm
The Thing
125 Maiden Lane
New York, NY

Why the hell does every monster want to go to Tokyo and stamp on it? Why do we feel sorry if the monster gets shot at the end? Why does it always return? These and other questions that are highly relevant to every first grade or post-doc monster are dealt with in the video “On Rules and Monsters - An Introduction to Free Cooperation”. German political theorist, cultural critic and video maker Christoph Spehr presents his video, with Tony Conrad and Stephanie Rothenberg starring as speakers and appearances by Godzilla, Gwangi, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and many more, along with his new video “Hold On, Wilson - Of Islands and Utopia”.

Free entrance, bring ID

Working on and with Eigensinn – A new approach to Media | Art | Education

by Giaco Schiesser
Lecture, October 19

Abstract:
The lecture focuses on a media and art education in pace with the times, on the basis of a new approach: the conception of "Eigensinn" (approx.: wilful obstinacy) - a term that only exists in the German languages - of media and of artists is developed in detail in its richness and fixed as the crucial artistic and media productive force. Giving an insight in some central influences / demarcations/ transformations of different media explored and used by artists in Europe in the 20th century, it proposes that a forward-looking media art education in pace with the times could rest on three pillars:

1. Training in individual, collective and collaborative "media authorship."

2. Working on and with the "Eigensinn of media" (e.g. film, photography, computers / networks and the fine arts).

3. "Art as process" / "art as technique." These three pillars are worked out and presented in detail.

Conversation with Giaco Schiesser, part 1

Conversation with Giaco Schiesser
part 1, view (142 MB)

Read essay

Technologies for Interauthorship, A Lecture by Artur Matuck

October 4, 2005

As the computer enlarges its range of action, human expression has been increasingly shaped by collaborative systems of authorship. These systems can be defined as computer systems that attain autonomy or semi-autonomy in the structuring of complex signs.
Computer systems are able to organize information into highly complex clusters and may eventually surpass the human ability to generate original artworks. The prospect of artificially programmed 'authors' challenges artists' identities as they have been traditionally defined. In the process, a series of questions emerge.

How are artists and writers reacting to forms of artificial intelligence, media technology, and software, that can be seen as new 'authors'? How do theoreticians, historians and critics evaluate the authoring of meaning created by computer programs?
Is the human mind now being challenged to supersede the creative abilities of technomedia and electronic systems? What becomes of artists when artificial processes are prioritized over the human production of meaning?

This lecture at the Department of Media Study will review the work of designers and electronic authors. Matuck will describe interdisciplinary collaborations that focused on inter-authorship; the process of designing artificial 'authors' in art or literature; the actual production of artificial 'authors' and a theoretical reflection on the possible futures of authorship.

About Dr Artur Matuck
Artur Matuck has been an assistant professor at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of Sao Paolo since 1984. In Sao Paolo (Brazil), Europe and North America, he has worked as teacher, researcher, writer, visual artist, video producer, performer and more recently as a designer of teleart events and interactive sites.

Since 1977 Matuck contributed to conferences and workshops on New Media Arts, Interactive Television, Telecommunication Arts, Performance Art, Computer-Generated Writing, and Intellectual Property issues. In 1990, he was awarded a prize in the video-art category from the São Paulo Art Critics Association. In the same year, he completed a comprehensive study on the history of video art and interactive television, which resulted in the doctoral thesis: "The Dialogical Potential of Television." In 1991 at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) he produced Reflux, a global Telecommunication Arts project. This project produced at CMU while in residence as research fellow was one of the very first artistic experiments to involve collaborative networking activities.
In 1995, as post-graduate fellow at the University of Florida, he started to experiment with text-reprocessing. "Landscript" is a web-based tool that co-authored textual creation. In 2002 this piece was included in the 25th Sao Paolo Biennial (in the net art category).
Artur Matuck is also the creator of "Semion"-- an international symbol for released information, a theoretical and conceptual contribution to the ongoing debates on intellectual property rights and information dissemination. His most recent endeavors include the planning of video communication and web-based multicultural, international exchanges between artists, researchers and individuals.

Short Introduction to the "Semion" (1972) by Artur Matuck

This recording by Artur Matuck (University of Sao Paolo) was ended by a network interruption.

Axel Bruns at iDC

September 29, 2005

"I know new media art when I see it."

The Art of Participation: Collaborative Mapping

May 16
6:30pm
The Thing at Postmasters

A lecture by Dr. Judith Rodenbeck and Trebor Scholz

Museum curators often frame new media art in modernist terms that attempt to easy and familiar rules for institutional inclusion or exclusion. Yet while many emerging participatory mapping projects can be experienced at art festivals such as Transmediale, ISEA, and Ars Electronica, when it comes to more traditional art institutions their validity as art is often questioned. Emerging art needs new venues and old venues need a new definition of art.

This event takes two approaches to the problem. One is to probe the aesthetic criteria on which institutions base their decisions about constantly shifting shape of new media art projects; the other is to explore a partial genealogy for collaborative mapping projects. Since the 1960s the notion of simple physical participation has increasingly been supplemented by more media-based and technologically mediated interactivity. An art historical line from Marcel Duchamp's nominalist interventions into the
spaces of display idea to the  participatory projects of the 1960s, routed through the open forms advocated by John Cage and Umberto Eco, can be traced in the background of collaborative mapping projects.

The open access flow of information in participatory mapping projects constitutes an aesthetics that has the potential to reverse engineer the original military purposes of networked technologies. Locative techno-creative projects contrast the hierarchical organization of the military command-control-communication model and the commercial hard sell with online models of urban sites annotated and updated collectively by a multiplicity of the people who actually inhabit them. This gesture is
similar to that behind the creation of the virtual city De Digitale Stad in Amsterdam in the 90s and other collaborative networked authoring projects.

About:
Judith Rodenbeck is an art historian whose work concentrates on intermedia and time-based practices of the 1960s. She is currently chair of the Division of Visual Culture at Sarah Lawrence College. http://pages.slc.edu/~jrodenbe/

Trebor Scholz is a New York-based media artist whose practice includes the facilitation of discursive networks and writing about collaborative new media art and education.

Richard Barbrook

16 Beaver Group, NYC
April 25, 6:30pm
http://www.16beavergroup.org/events/archives/001471.php

Dr. Richard Barbrook is coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Institute / University of Westminster and researcher-in-residence at the Institute for Distributed Creativity.

Abstract:

'Imaginary Futures.'

In the modern world, our understanding of the present is often shaped by sci-fi fantasies about what is to come.

Ironically, the most influential of these visions of the future are already decades old. We are already living in the times when they were supposed to have come true. In his presentations, Richard Barbrook will analyze the
origins and evolution of three imaginary futures: artificial intelligence; the information society; and the gift culture. By showing that the future is what it used to be, he will argue that it is time for us to invent new futures…

Dr. Richard Barbrook was educated at Cambridge, Essex and Kent universities. During the early-1980s, he was involved in pirate and community radio broadcasting. He helped to set up Spectrum Radio, a multi-lingual station operating in London, and published extensively on radio issues. In the late-1980s and early-1990s, Richard worked for a research institute at the University of Westminster on media regulation within the EU. Some of this research was later published in 'Media Freedom: the contradictions of communications in the age of modernity' (Pluto Press, London 1995).

Since the mid-1990s, Richard has been coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster and is course leader of its MA in Hypermedia Studies. In collaboration with Andy Cameron, he wrote 'The Californian Ideology' which was a pioneering critique of the neo-liberal politics of 'Wired'magazine. In the last few years, Richard has written a series of articles exploring the impact of the sharing of information over the Net, including ‘The Hi-Tech Gift Economy’ and ‘Cyber-communism’. He is presently working on a book - ‘Imaginary Futures’ – which is about how ideas from the 1960s and 1970s shape our contemporary conception of the information society. A selection of Richard’s writings are available on the Hypermedia Research Centre's website.

McKenzie Wark and Trebor Scholz in conversation with Richard Barbrook

Monday, April 18, 6pm
Room 316 Graduate Faculty
New School University
65 5th Ave
(between 13th & 14th Sts)

'Imaginary Futures'
In the modern world, our understanding of the present is often shaped by sci-fi fantasies about what is to come. Ironically, the most influential of these visions of the future are already decades old. We are already living in the times when they were supposed to have come true. In his presentations, Richard Barbrook will analyse the origins and evolution of three imaginary futures: artificial intelligence; the information society; and the gift culture. By showing that the future is what it used to be, he will argue that it is time for us to invent new futures.

Richard Barbrook is one of the most radical critics of the neo-liberal cyber-elite. In contrast, Barbrook thinks that the importance of the latest wave of technological innovation lies precisely in its ability to challenge the ideologies of the self-proclaimed opinion leaders. The Net allows for the emergence of spontaneous and flexible virtual communities, defining themselves less by market exchange than by social convention.
Richard Barbrook was educated at Cambridge, Essex and Kent universities. During the early-1980s, he was involved in pirate and community radio broadcasting. In the late-1980s and early-1990s, Richard worked for a research institute at the University of Westminster on media regulation within the EU. For the last few years, Richard has been coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster and was the first course leader of its MA in Hypermedia Studies. At present, Richard is preparing 'Imaginary Futures' for publication as a book.
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/

Trebor Scholz is a media artist, writer and organizer who works in the fields of media art, event-based cultural practice, education, and network culture. His work has been exhibited at the Sao Paulo Biennial, the Venice Biennial (with Martha Rosler/ The Fleas), the Web Biennial of the Istanbul Museum for Contemporary Art and many other venues. Scholz has facilitated several large scale programs such as "FreeCooperation" (with Geert Lovink),  "Right2Fight" (with Dominique Malaquais), "Aestheticization of War" (PS1/MOMA), and Kosovo: Carnival in the Eye of the Storm. He has lectured at ISEA 04 (Helsinki, Tallin), Transmediale 04 (Berlin), Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Conference (Singapore), Stanford University, New York University, University of California Los Angeles, and Dartmouth College. He is professor and researcher at the Department of Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo. In 2004 Scholz founded the Institute for Distributed Creativity.
http://molodiez.org

McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard 2004) and several other books. He co-edited the nettime anthology Readme! (Autonomedia 1999). He teaches media studies at New School University.
http://www.ludiccrew.org/wark/

Reshaping the Wireless Commons

A Lecture by Brooke Singer (NYC Wireless) April 11, 5pm , CFA 112
(organized in collaboration between the Institute for Distributed Creativity and the Art Department, SUNY at Buffalo)

As wireless technologies reshape our social interactions and the environments we inhabit, these same technologies provide new possibilities for independent media production. Brooke Singer will discuss her most recent collaborations both as an artist and curator that utilize wireless (Wi-Fi, mobile phone cameras, RFID) as tools for initiating discussion and positive system failures. She is focused on emerging technologies not only because they are fun, but also because they are malleable and contingent.

www.bsing.net
www.preemptivemedia.net
www.spectropolis.info
www.moport.org

Brooke Singer is a digital media artist and arts organizer who lives in Brooklyn. She is currently Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase. She recently exhibited “Swipe,” a collaboration with Beatriz da Costa and Jamie Schulte, in Database Imaginary at the Banff Centre and co-curated Spectropolis, a wireless art event in Lower Mahattan with NYCwireless and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.