Web 2.0 Studies // Critical Internet Theory with Geert Lovink

Research Methodologies Workshop
December 15th and 16th, 2008
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne

The School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne is seeking applications from researchers who wish to take part in a two day methodologies workshop with Professor Geert Lovink (Director, Institute of Network Culture, Amsterdam). Participation is free but places are limited and will be restricted to participants who are engaged in research relating to the theme of Web 2.0 studies and
critical Internet theory. Participants will be chosen based on a competitive application process and priority will be give to postgraduates and early career researchers. The workshop will include a discussion of the work of Geert Lovink and presentations from successful applicants.

Workshop Theme

This two-day intensive workshop will focus on critical methodologies for studying Web 2.0. In relation to the contemporary Internet, there is an obvious need to move beyond cultural studies approaches to fandom, where active consumption is simply recast as participatory culture without any assessment of the economic and technological forces driving user-generated content. Rather than relying on the Jenkins-style models of convergence and the notion of collective intelligence, this workshop will encourage participants to consider the alternative possibilities and theoretical problems facing a materialist understanding of network culture.

For instance, to what extent can software studies move from engineering issues and technologically-focused specifications to outline a broader analytics of power? What sort of creative concepts are available for understanding the everyday practices of blogging? How can organized networks transform their dependence on free labor to reach greater economic sustainability?

While the theme is framed in part by Geert Lovink's ongoing theoretical work, this workshop also allows for the opportunity to discuss some of the more general difficulties facing Internet research, including questions of scale, speed and temporality, theories of technology, debates around networked politics and modes of
collaboration.

Some key topics:

- organized networks
- theories of blogging
- recent web 2.0 literature (Bruns, Zittrain, Shirky)
- software studies and protocol (Fuller, Galloway)
- distributed aesthetics
- free labor and collaboration

The ARC Cultural Research Network has agreed to fund 3 stipends of up to $750 to support travel and accommodation costs of participants from outside Melbourne.

How to Apply: Applications are due by Friday Nov 21, 2008.
Applications must include a 250-word summary of your research topic,
highlighting links to the theme and a one-page curriculum vitae.

Applications and further information should be sent to Michael Dieter
at mdieter {AT} unimelb.edu.au

Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures(INC), is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was based at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004, Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is
the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments
(2007).

Geert's weblog: www.networkcultures.org/geert

earts festival 策展人工作坊

开始时间: 9月29日 周一 11:00
结束时间: 9月29日 周一 16:00
地点: 上海 大拇指广场，浦东芳甸路199弄28号
发起人: 证大艺术馆
构建中：策略-模式-联系
　　
　　地点：证大现代艺术馆
　　主办：证大现代艺术馆，澳大利亚新南威尔士大学当代艺术及政治研究中心
　　
　　上海证大现代艺术馆将于2008年9月29日（星期一）举行《建构中：策略—模式—联系》工作坊/讨论会，敬请您参加。
　　
　　 该工作坊由上海证大现代艺术馆和澳大利亚新南威尔士大学当代艺术与政治研究中心联合主办，由皇甫秉惠女士和Jill Bennett女士共同担任策划和主持。
　　
　　 本次工作坊旨在探讨如何通过艺术来建立我们与这个纷繁多变的世界之间的互为关系，并将重点关注展览的模式。
　　
　　
　　
　　
　　拟定议题：
　　
　　1. 展览不是简单地呈现现有的文化思潮，还将催生新的社会网络和可能性。
　　
　　2. 策划当代艺术展不受地域人种的限制，旨在让不同地区的作品产生互动。
　　
　　3. 艺术不是展示现成的观念状态，而是作为一种渠道，与日常生活发生联系。艺术的这一功能是如何体现的？
　　
　　4. 对话是如何通过美学术语呈现的？一个展览的动态空间有哪些社会因素构成？
　　
　　5. 跨学科实践是否正朝着改变、颠覆原有学科和领域的方向发展？还是说这种跨学科实践是对原有学科和领域的扩大、延伸？
　　
　　6. 这是否是连接艺术与公众的一种新方式？或者它促进了各类艺术文化更加固守其原来的形式？
　　
　　电话咨询：50339801-2004
　　
　　
　　
　　拟订议题请见图
　　
　　本活动需要预约：请各位发邮件给我们留下姓名，手机
　　电话咨询：50339801-2004

EXPERIMENTA JOB VACANCY - CURATOR

Experimenta is seeking a curator to drive its exhibition, touring and project activities. The ideal candidate will have experience in the curation and commissioning of media art, and more broadly, contemporary art, production management experience in the hosting of large scale exhibitions and events and the ability to create exceptional curatorial projects.
Details.
Closing date: 3rd October 2008, 17:00 hrs Australian Eastern Standard Time

Urban Screen Melbourne 08

Urban Screens Melbourne 08 is hosted by Fed Square Pty Ltd, and is the third international conference and multimedia exhibition in a series of worldwide Urban Screens events. It will also mark the official launch of the International Urban Screens Association, taking place 3-8 October at Federation Square, Melbourne.


Conference: Mobile Publics 3-5 October 2008 Full Program

What caught me are the case studies from Manray Hsu :

2008 Taipei Biennial - A case study

Urban screens have become a kind of meta-architecture. Through their ubiquity and fluidity, these screens, especially the large ones, constantly redefine the spatial relationships of the urban environment. They are new defining architectures of architecture. The 2008 Taipei Biennial utilized some of these screens as part of its venue for showing video-based works. On the one hand, this presents both an opportunity for more unpredictable encounters between art and urban space users, and offers challenges for the recontextualization of these works. On the other, it also poses the question of whether art is able to destabilize a public space generated and maintained by these meta-architectures, to add ambiguities to the certainty of information, of the social dream of the capitalist society. Aside from these curatorial and artistic aspects, my presentation will also touch on practical and technical aspects such as the technology of display, timing and encountering.

and also from Andreas Broeckmann

'Intimate Publics. Memory, Performance, and Spectacle in Urban Environments'
Cities are sites of spectacle. We walk around, looking into faces, checking out shop windows, posters, screens and facades, scanning for the new, the unexpected, the beautiful, and the wicked. The 'screen' of the city is cluttered with surfaces and items, vying for attention. A barely distinguishable mix of mediated messages we either look for - whether as street signs, clues we want to find again, or maybe as oversized TV screens during a popular sports event - while other items we barely notice, or learn to ignore. What does it mean to 'look' in public space? Are we being cheated, or caressed, by the empty billboards whose surface time no advertiser has rented? Do the large video screens testify to the triumph of a post-urban anonymity, or are they mere signs of a failed attempt at competing with the intimate media that vibrate in back pockets, and that cocoon the gaze and the listening mind? What does Josef Robakowski's 1978 video, From My Window, tell us about the multiple layers of public and private observations, about the interlacing of personal curiosity, voyeurism, and state surveillance? Who are the subjects of viewing in public space? And what does it mean to perform the city space, furrowed with surveillance technology, like those people in Noise (1998) who left their anonymous video messages to the recording box that Zoran Todorovic placed in the streets of Belgrade? The view from the window of Berlin's Staatsbibliothek cafeteria in 1998, out onto the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz, before the fall of the Wall, an age before the construction of the Sony Center: a personal memory, shared by many, a lost image reflected in Wim Wenders' movie, Wings of Desire (1987), that has Curt Bois stumbling across what used to be Potsdamer Platz, unable to find a real equivalent for his half-century old memories of the city's face. Each city, wherever people live, is rife with such imaginations, a cultural stage, and a container of mediated memories.

The Urban screen community is the development of Mirjam Struppek whose blog has been inspiring for almost a decade.

Re:live : Call For Papers – Deadline 19th December 2008

Third International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology
Melbourne 26-29 November 2009

Third International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology.The next iteration of the Media Art History conference is Re:live which is to be held in Melbourne, Victoria in 2009. The event follows the success of the two previous Media Art History conferences, re:fresh (Banff 2005) and re:place (Berlin 2007). The conference series is an initiative of Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for Art, Science and Technology) whose International Advisory Committee will publicise the event and referee papers.
In developing the Re:live conference, we have established a national committee, to promote awareness and interest in the event across Australia. This committee is comprised of individuals who can drive forward these newer connections and reconnect with the ongoing themes established by the ‘re’ conferences. Australia provides an excellent geographic, geopolitical and geocultural space for hosting this conference. It connects regionally with both Asian and Pacific cultures and the ongoing exchange of media arts between, northern and southern hemispheres.
When I look into their web archive, I can see very good documentation of their conference and this one particularly catch my eye on archive.

Conference chairs: Dr Paul Thomas, Professor Sean Cubitt

International Conference on Pervasive Computing

Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability to be held at the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 19th, 2008, Sydney, Australia

http://www.urbaninformatics.net/green/

Environmental sustainability and climate change are issues which must no longer be ignored by anyone, any industry or any academic community. The pervasive technology, ubiquitous computing and HCI community is slowly waking up to these global concerns. The Nobel Peace Price 2007 was awarded to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. The citation highlights the urgency of the fact that information and awareness around causes and implications are necessary but not sufficient to combat climate change. Action is required.

The key theme of this workshop around environmental sustainability will be addressed threefold:

1. Providing people with environmental data and educational information – via mass communications such as film, TV and print and new media, or micro communications such as pervasive sensor networks (cf. Participatory Urbanism and Ergo at urban-atmospheres.net; real-time Rome at senseable.mit.edu; biomapping.net; placeengine.com) – may not trigger sufficient motivation to get people to change their habits towards a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle. This workshop seeks to develop a better understanding how to go beyond just informing and into motivating and encouraging action and change.

2. Pervasiveness can easily turn invasive. It has already caused negative consequences in biological settings (e.g., algae in lakes and oceans, kudzu vine in the southeastern US, rabbits and cane toads in Australia). Pervasive can be a dangerous term when the ecological impacts are disregarded. Pervasive technology is no different. In order to avoid further serious damage to the environment, this workshop aims to lay the foundations to start re-considering the impact of pervasive technology from an ecological perspective.

3. Addressing the 21st century Digital Divide: The mass uptake of pervasive technology brings about digitally networked and augmented societies; however, access is still not universal. Castells and others use the notion of the ‘digital divide’ to account for those whose voices are not heard by this technology. Initially, the divide was seen only between the first and third worlds and then between urban and rural, but with today’s near ubiquitous coverage, the digital divide between humans and the environment needs to be addressed. Virtual environments could give the natural world an opportunity to ‘speak’. How can we address imbalances? For example, sensors embedded in the environment could allow creeks and rivers to blog their own pollution levels, local parks can upload images of native bird life. Can the process of ‘blogging sensor data’ (sensorbase.org) assist us in becoming more aware of the needs of nature? How can we avoid the downsides?

Further information is available at
http://www.urbaninformatics.net/green/

Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology
Christine Satchell, Queensland University of Technology
Eric Paulos, Intel Research Berkeley
Tom Igoe, Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York
Carlo Ratti, SENSEable City Laboratory, MIT

Accepted position papers

Notes on the Political Image: Pervasive Computing, Modeling Assemblage, and Ecological Governance
Benjamin H. Bratton 1, Natalie Jeremijenko 2
1 University of California, Los Angeles, USA
2 New York University, USA

The Potential of UbiComp Technologies to Determine the Carbon Footprints of Products
Ali Dada 1,3, Thorsten Staake 2, Elgar Fleisch 1,2
1 Institute of Technology Management (ITEM-HSG), University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
2 Information Management, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
3 SAP Research CEC St. Gallen, Switzerland

Towards Participatory Design of Ambient Persuasive Technology
Janet Davis
Department of Computer Science, Grinnell College, USA

Motivating Environmentally Sustainable Behavior Changes with a Virtual Polar Bear
Tawanna Dillahunt, Geof Becker, Jennifer Mankoff, Robert Kraut
Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

Points of Persuasion: Strategic Essentialism and Environmental Sustainability
Paul Dourish
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, USA

Understanding motivation and enabling action towards change
Penny Hagen, Duncan Underwood
digitaleskimo.net, Surry Hills, NSW, Australia

The New Well-Tempered Environment: Tuning Buildings and Cities
Dan Hill, Duncan Wilson
arup.com, London, UK, and Sydney, Australia

Promoting Environmentally Sustainable Behaviors Using Social Marketing in Emerging Persuasive Technologies
Omar Khan, John Canny
Berkeley Institute of Design, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Context-Aware Pervasive Persuasive Systems for Managing Water and Energy Usage, and CO2 Emissions: Multi-Levelled Policies, Goals, and an Expert Systems Shell Approach
Seng W. Loke, Jugdutt Singh, Hai Le
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

Using persuasive technology to encourage sustainable behavior
Cees Midden, Teddy McCalley, Jaap Ham, Ruud Zaalberg
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Participate: Producing a Mass Scale Environmental Campaign for Pervasive Technology
Mark Paxton
Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, UK

The Design of Imprint: "Walk the Walk" and Other Lessons
Zachary Pousman, Hafez Rouzati, Katie Collins, John Stasko
Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA

Understanding and Influencing Spatio-Temporal Visitor Movement in National Parks Based on Static and Dynamic Sensor Data
Katja Schechtner, Helmut Schrom-Feiertag
arsenal.ac.at, Vienna, Austria

TerraPed: A Design Concept for Sustainability
Jennifer Stein
School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

Challenging Comfort & Cleanliness Norms through Interactive In-Home Feedback Systems
Yolande Strengers
School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Taking the Guesswork out of Environmentally Sustainable Lifestyles
Ronak Sutaria 1, Aalok Deshmukh 2
1 urbansensors.com, San Francisco, USA
2 Rocky Mountain Institute, Boulder, CO, USA

EcoIsland: A System for Persuading Users to Reduce CO2 Emissions
Chihiro Takayama 1, Vili Lehdonvirta 2
1 Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
2 Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland

MAAP Media Art Mentorship Program

MAAP - Multimedia Art Asia Pacific is calling for applications from young and emerging curators and artists working with a focus in media art projects that intersect or consider connections with the Asia Pacific regions to undertake a three-month mentorship.

The mentorship enables an emerging artist or curator to explore new creative directions, increase knowledge of networks, debates and to expand practical skills. Applicants are invited to select a mentor and develop a program of activity spanning a three-month period. The mentor may be accessed locally, nationally or internationally. In some cases MAAP can assist identifying suitable mentors.

Applicants must be Australian media art practitioners or curators who are 30 years or under. The mentorship will provide a fee for the mentee ($7,200 excl GST) and a fee for the mentor ($1,800 excl GST). The mentorship program should be completed by February 2008.

Other Australian Media Arts organsiations ANAT, d.lux and Experimenta are also offering mentorships: + ANAT will encompass distributed, portable, online, wearable, gaming, mobile and emerging platforms, contact Gavin Artz manager@anat.org.au + d.lux will hold their mentorship inside Second Life or a similar online virtual community, contact malcolm@dlux.org.au for more information + Experimenta's focus is on Site Related and/or Public Work, contact kentia@expeirmenta.org for more information.

MAAP APPLICATIONS CLOSE Friday 17 AUGUST 2007

For further information, guidelines and an applications form please contact:

Kim Machan, director kim@maap.org.au
MAAP-Multimedia Art Asia Pacific

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government’s Young and Emerging Artists Initiative through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.MAAP gratefully acknowledges the contract draft administration support offered by CraftSouth

Video Art by Grant Stevens Explores Emptiness

I probably should know Grant Stevens from MAAP in Singapore 2004. Here is a pic from their site, presenting "Dazed and Praised (2004),Digital Video".

Grant Stevens, Turtle Twilight, 2006, two channel digital video, duration variable, 2 channels, 4mins & 10mins 57secs, infinite loop, edition of 5
The meaningless clichés that abound in popular forms of mass entertainment are the source of inspiration for Australian video artist Grant Stevens. However, the subject of Stevens’ works seems to be the viewer — his works calling into question the viewers’ acceptance of popular catch phrases as meaningful forms of communication.

“Cliché and Collusion: Video Works by Grant Stevens” is a new exhibition at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art of 12 video installations by Stevens that explores the language and communication of popular culture. In his works, which mainly consist of successive flashes of white text on black screens, Stevens recombines text from advertisements, music, film and common conversation to engage the viewer and solicit questions and critique. Several works incorporate visual film clips or rely heavily on audio monologues.

Museum of Art Director Campbell Gray says Stevens’ work draws attention to the meaningless nature of popular communication and the viewers’ acceptance of it by intentionally subverting the viewers’ expectation of these commonplace expressions. “Often, the textual, visual or audible message of a Grant Stevens work seems to follow a pattern of Hollywood construction or a trend in everyday speech,” he says. “But just as viewers expect the pattern to mount toward a climax or conclusion, Stevens subverts the anticipated course.”

For example, in a text-based work titled “Some Want It All” the snippets of text that flash onto the screen are accompanied by the high-energy music typical of a movie preview. The text, which Stevens has appropriated from actual cinematic trailers, seems to tell a story that is building toward a climax. But the work never reaches a resolution, it keeps stringing one typical movie trailer line after another until the video loops, and it starts all over again.

“We hope this exhibition causes our visitors to ask critical questions about their relationship with the mass media and popular forms of communication,” says Herman DuToit, Museum of Art educator. “To what extent do we automatically accept the general level of discourse in popular culture as our own? What impact does mass media have on our personal worldview and hence on our individual construction of reality?”

Stevens recently received a doctorate from the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane , Australia and has exhibited his video installations in Australia , England , Indonesia , Italy , Serbia and Singapore . This exhibition at the BYU Museum of Art marks the first museum exhibition of Stevens’ artwork in the United States and presents a varied selection of his new media art.

“Cliché and Collusion: Video Works by Grant Stevens” will open Friday, Sept. 14, 2007 and will be on view through Saturday, Feb. 9, 2008 in the Conway A. Ashton & Carl E. Jackman Gallery on the museum’s lower level. This exhibition is made possible in part by The Eccles Foundation, Curtis and Mary Ann Atkisson, and the Museum of Art Store . Admission to the exhibition is free of charge.