New Media Arts

London.
Next at Transforming Audiences is Nicola Kaye, who focusses on developing communicative spaces through her creative practice. This is in line with the idea that the role of the artist is now to construct the social spaces and constraints for the audience to co-construct the work, and builds on the increasing availability of digital, social, creative tools such as Flickr or YouTube while highlighting the as yet undecided power structures within such spaces. Creativity has an important role to play in examining the potential uses for such spaces.

Frankfurt.
The final speaker here at the Prosumer Revisited conference is Gerhard Panzer, whose interest is in the consumption of cultural goods. Such cultural consumption can be defined as the purchase and/or use of cultural works and services; these are objects that have specific embedded meanings, whose quality is realised through the process of reception. Their value is determined through attention and recognition; consumers of such objects are therefore co-producers of (the value of) cultural works.

Cultural producers, in turn, are also consumers of other cultural producers' works, and are influenced by their wider environment (competitors, financiers, publishers, audiences, etc.). This influence may have taken place against the wishes of cultural producers (where patrons or publishers altered works) or may have been specifically sought out by cultural producers (for example through live performance). Indeed, markets for cultural products are themselves also complex networks of institutions.

Athens.
The third panellist at WebSci '09 is Olga Pozeli. She says that film appeared in the late 1800s, and was exhibited at first in music halls - the first properly exhibited movie was a comedy. Film and theatre have long been aligned, and film provides a magic spectacle. The use of technological innovations in film and theatre has been artistically and politically justified by many filmmakers and dramatists along the way, but there has also been criticism of this, arguing especially that technologically augmented theatre was in effect apologising for not being film.

Athens.
The next panellist at WebSci '09 is Michael Marmarinos, and he begins by presenting himself as 'a normal human being'. He notes the increasing speed of human communication as it is augmented by the Internet, the Web - and in the face of this, he feels awe, and the enthusiasm of the ignorant. Technology is in conversation with time, and as speed increases, we become smaller.

The speed of change is difficult to assess while change takes place - it may be amazing and scary at the same time. He suggests that the speed of change can be described mathematically as our ability to change divided by the range of possibilities which we can imagine, and this fraction tends towards one (if I've got this right - I do appreciate the live interpretation, but I wish the interpreter would bloody well sit still rather than noisily fidgeting about in her cabin, and chewing gum!).

Athens.
The cultural convergence session at WebSci '09 continues with a panel composed of Greek musicians, actors, and directors. Electronic musician Konstantinos Bita, who began his work on Ataris and Amigas, reflects on his introduction to digital technology, and the gradually growing importance of electronic networks - using modems at first, and then connecting more directly to the Internet. In the early days, access was often free, but then commercial interests began to build their walled gardens with the aim to enrich themselves; with Web 2.0, Konstantinos believes, a further change will occur which further isolates people and locks them into online pursuits without providing real sociality.

Athens.
Next up at WebSci '09 is a panel session on cultural convergence and digital technology, with representatives of the Greek creative industries sector. The first speaker is PASOK MP Maria Damanaki, though,who notes the importance of the Web and of digital technology for culture and creativity. Any form of human activity which is not expressed in a digital form could even be considered to be obsolete, she says, and there are new horizons for the creators of culture in this digital environment - namely, cultural convergence.

Singapore.
The day five session at ISEA 2008 continues with Greg Giannis. He presents his work through a mapping interface he's been working on for some time; the aim here is to engage in subjective mapping - which maps media objects (texts, images, sound, video) captured live while moving in the physical work onto a map operated through an experimental Website. Display on the Website uses what Greg calls semantic zooming - more information from captured objects is revealed as the user focusses on them by zooming in.

Such mapping aims to investigate our sense of place, and there is currently something of a crisis in the cartographic community, Greg suggests, driven by changes in approaches to mapping; the community is looking towards artists to help them develop new approaches to cartography, and this is similar perhaps to the crisis in art as it emerged with the advent of photography. What's especially interesting here is the possibility of collective mapping (which can also serve as a form of collective resistance against the increasingly engineered sense of individual subjectivity).

Singapore.
We had the closing ceremony last night already, but there's still a final day of ISEA 2008 papers to go. The morning session this Wednesday starts with Tristan Thielmann, presenting on geomedia as a potential Web 3.0. He describes this as a shift towards WWWW (who, what, when, where), and points to Google's shift towards a more strongly map-based service (which on Google Maps itself combines photos and Wikipedia content with map information, for example). Flickr, too, has announced that it will georeference all its content in the future.

Singapore.
The session here at ISEA 2008 continues with Drew Hemment, who reflects on his experience running the Futuresonic locative media festival in the UK. Of particular interest here is the contradiction between the excitement of locative media practitioners and the concerns around privacy which such media forms also highlight. Our locative devices trace our movements.

What art forms are intrinsic or unique to locative media, then? This was explored through the 2004 Mobile Connections exhibition. Such locative art can be understood to be the art of mobile and wireless systems, and it is possible to develop a taxonomy of locative media art works (works which are realist, figurative, or social on the one hand, and/or engage in mapping, ambulation, or geoannotation on the other). Many locative media works continue to show little or no engagement with lived spaces and social contexts, however.

Singapore.
The post-lunch session on this fourth day of ISEA 2008 starts with Daniel Sauter. He begins by noting the interdependent relationship between architects, artists and designers which has emerged in recent years - a media architecture or mediatecture driven by a number of significant practitioners. Daniel's focus here is especially on the model of site-specificity in this context.

New York's Times Square or Tokyo's Shibuya are important sites for such work, but there are also other venues which function differently and move beyond anthropomorphic dimensions. One such venue is the Victory Media Network in Dallas with several large movable video screens; another is Federation Square in Melbourne, which hosts the third Urban Screens Conference this year; Kunsthaus Graz is an art space which works in a similar space - a vaguely zeppelin-shaped building clothed in a skin of several hundred lightbulbs which can be manipulated. Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center has a digital facade, and something similar has been designed for the Beijing Olympics multifunction arena and the CCTV Broadcast Headquarters in the same city. Further, in Dubai the Dubai Pearl will be developed - a glowing pearl-shaped space suspended above Dubai.