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Proceedings of ISEA2008 Proceedings of ISEA2008 The 14th International Symposium on Electronic Art 25 July – 3 August 2008 Singapore ISEA2008 14th International Symposium on Electronic Art Copyright © Individual Authors Published by ISEA2008 Pte Ltd ISBN: 978-981-08-0768-9 Copyright notice: All rights reserved by individual authors; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher. Individual authors of papers and presentations are solely responsible for all materials submitted for the publication. The publisher does not warrant or assume any legal responsibilities for the publication’s content. All opinions expressed in the book are of the authors and do not refl ect those of the publisher. Editorial Team: Ingrid Maria Hoofd, Margaret Tan, Katharine Ho Kit Ying Printed by SC (Sang Choy) International Pte Ltd Design and layout by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd Cover design by Ong Puay Khim Introduction The global and unequally distributed proliferation of information, communication and experiential technologies has led to the development of a highly differentiated and structurally complicated media arts fi eld. Even as the advent of some technologies is actively celebrated and their potential exploited by some, some others have barely come to grips with the possibilities of ‘long-obsolescent’ technologies. Even as some struggle with the newness of certain technologies, others somewhat jaded with the determinative infl uence on their lives and creativity are consciously opting for ‘old’ and ‘low’ technologies. In such a globally differentiated situation, the very notions of ‘new’ and ‘old’ technologies though pandered as an issue of relative sophistication is revealed as an issue of relative access largely determined by historical, political, economic and cultural contexts. That such technologies have become important engines of economic development has made a critical evaluation of their complicities in and complex relationships to particular socio-cultural, economic and political ways of being especially diffi cult. That one can simultaneously critique technologies and yet enjoy the benefi ts and pleasures of some particular technologies might seem like a compromise and sell-out for some, but is a necessary aspect of one’s being in a world infused with such technologies to a point where opting out is both pragmatically impossible and ethically irresponsible. In the art world, the problems of how one critically evaluates creative uses of technology is often confused with the questions of how one creatively enables the critical uses of technology. The themes for ISEA2008 Symposium have been selected to respond to the challenges of new and old technologies in creatively engaging the critical problems and possibilities of our age. The themes are Locating Media, wikiwiki, Ludic Interfaces, Reality Jam and Border Transmissions. Locating media The oft-heard rhetoric of recent media technologies is that it complicates traditional notions of spatial and geographical location insofar as these technologies are said to attend to one’s technological needs without regard to where one is; for example, one common myth goes like this: ‘one can access information about anything and communicate with people on the net without regard to which country one is in’. Such postulations of location-neutrality however are based on a fallacious assumption that one’s location is merely a secondary aspect of one’s experiential environment and thus can be phenomenologically simulated or even negligibly circumvented by the mediation of communication, information and experiential technologies. Location, however, is a complex experience constituted by one’s cultural, economic, political and technological environment that is differentially distributed and conceived in different parts of the world. Thus, new technologies, even while purporting to surmount location, seem to be merely following the contours of the location-specifi c variables that operate in any particular space. While many recent technologies also present themselves as ‘location-aware’ that enable one’s ability to address these location-specifi c variables in some ways, it is noteworthy that such experiences very often rely on simulating only an indexical notion of location through a series of sensory cues related to a particular space. In light of the centrality of location as a critical issue and possibility, this theme seeks to examine how the specifi cities of location mediate and are media-ted by both old and new technologies of information, communication and experience. Wiki wiki It is interesting that the Hawaiian word, ‘wiki wiki’, meaning “quick” has become co-opted to label the revolutionary systems and practices that support the easy and speedy tele-collaborative authoring of knowledge online — i.e., wiki. Wiki is an extremely easy-to-use authoring system for online content that cannibalizes on the HTML protocols with additional facilities to monitor all the changes being made, revert to content prior to editing as well as a space to discuss the evolving content. The fact that users are able to access the pages and change content without any restrictions, defi es the development of a notion of single authorship and thus also the possibility of authorial responsibility for such content. The relative ease in developing online content with a community of ‘at a distance’ presents wiki as a model tool for tele-collaborative production. Wiki is yet another example of how technologies are changing the ways in which creative knowledge production is being transformed by enabling collaboration between diverse individuals. In this theme, we seek to initiate discussion, deliberation and development in collaborative creation using new technologies. How have new and old technologies contributed to the development of collaborative making? What are some of the issues raised by collaborative creation; for example, authorship, artistic responsibility, claims to intellectual property, confl icts and confl uences of disciplinary knowledges and practices, etc. What are the spaces of such collaborative work — what are the transitional spaces between the artists’ studios and scientifi c labs? 14TH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ELECTRONIC ART 3 Ludic interfaces The infantilization of play, that is, the historical association of playing with children and non-serious activities, has led to the systematic exclusion of play and fun from ‘serious’ creative, scientifi c and technological investigations. While the ludic (i.e., play-related) dimensions of artistic creativity have been variously explored recently in both art works and in scholarly research, the interactions between technological developments and the pleasures described as ‘fun’, are few and far between. In fact, the history of technological development has more instances of people enjoying technologies than of those willing to acknowledge or systematically deliberate on such pleasures. It has been argued recently that the phenomenal development of the game and entertainment industries, primarily driven by various technologies that engender the expanded exploration of embodied pleasures, has highlighted the potential of technologically-driven experiences of fun. However, there are those who assert that there is still much more need to investigate the complicities between technology and pleasure in these experiences and to develop alternative modalities of exploring the technological possibilities of pleasure and vice versa. Reality jam While the reality effects of photography had forced a reevaluation of the conventions and concerns of painting as well as of perception in the mid 19th century, the realistic aspirations of recent visualization and experiential technologies (e.g., in animation, gaming, immersive environments, mixed/augmented reality) are forcing us to reconsider our registers of the ‘real’ in our media and our everyday lives. The con-fusing of the real and the virtual through seamless transitions and the perpetual obfuscation of the edges that demarcate them are increasingly the focus of scientifi c research as well as of creative works. The improvisational nature and interference potential of such ‘reality jamming’ — i.e., this pressing together of the real and virtual in a context where their distinctions are deliberately obscured — open further possibilities for research, scholarship and creative production. Artists and researchers should continue to explore the ways in which the ‘virtual’ presences and experiences of folklore, religious beliefs, magical rituals and science and media-fi ction interact with and counteract the lived experiences of the ‘real’. Border transmissions The ‘borderless world’ and the ‘global village’ are different imaginaries of a world seemingly transformed by the speed and effi ciency of information, communication and experiential technologies — of a world where the political borders of nation states were considered to be either irrelevant or diffi cult to sustain. The age that announced the ‘borderless world’ is, however, ironically also the one that has displayed the greatest anxiety about this breakdown and invested the largest amount of resources and time in the increasing surveillance and control of these borders. While these borders historically have been permeable to certain kinds of economic, socio-cultural, political and military transactions (i.e., trade,
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