<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hi All,<DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span">I was following some of the discussions here about conferencing formats and wanted to alert you to a first iteration online symposium we're organizing called <B>Breaking the Game <FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><A href="http://www.workspace-unlimited.org/breakingthegame/symposium00.htm">http://www.workspace-unlimited.org/breakingthegame/symposium00.htm</A></SPAN></FONT></B>. I was working out some of the symposium's concepts and formats while I was reading through iDC's ongoing discussions on "Conferencing Formats," and found the debates inspiring. In the ensuing weeks we'll be trying out a variety of experiments. We will post our experiences back to the iDC list. If you have additional thoughts about any of this, please don't hesitate to email. We will be doing new iterations of this project in months to come. So your input could be useful. Thanks.</SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">From </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><B>March 15-26 2006</B></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"> digital artist Thomas Soetens (Workspace Unlimited), architect Kora Van den Bulcke, and New York curator/producer Wayne Ashley present </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><B>Breaking the Game Symposium,</B></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"> a first-iteration online event that brings together competing theorists and practitioners to debate and reflect on virtual worlds, computer gaming, immersive technologies, and new possibilities for artistic practice and experience. The symposium will open up the art of game modification to the contingencies of everyday life, where interactive technologies increasingly mediate physical spaces and human movements in very complex and dynamic ways. The symposium themes are: Hybridity, Overclocking the City and The Virtual as Interface to Self and Society.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR style=""></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">Participants will consider gaming and other virtual technologies in relationship to building and designing cities, navigating and experiencing urban life, constructing identities, and creating and maintaining social interaction. The symposium encourages debate and discussion through multiple formats including text, video interviews, phone blogging, images, animation, and virtual walkthroughs.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">During this period we will explore all of the different ways for carrying on discussion remotely Sometimes we will communicate synchronously and bring participants together through iChat (video conferencing for the Mac), through Skype (telephone conferencing), or text messaging--sometimes in interview format, other times in group discussion. We will schedule this with you beforehand and send you technical information. We encourage participants to lead and organize debate on their own. Participants can always discuss and share asynchronously through text, like your typical online forum. We also want people to respond to one another with other media that they can upload themselves to our website. We understand that at certain times there will be more concentrated focus on specific issues. We don't expect people to be available all the time.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">In the registration form <FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><A href="http://www.workspace-unlimited.org/breakingthegame/subscribe.htm">http://www.workspace-unlimited.org/breakingthegame/subscribe.htm</A> </FONT>we ask that you put forth a proposal <B>(max 1 page)</B> for discussion or specific idea for participation, a framework, a perspective, a proposition, or a descriptive statement that articulates your relationship to one of the themes. There is a place in the registration form to fill that out called "proposal." This will help us understand your interests in relationship to the themes, and how you might relate to the other participants. What are the issues or questions that drive your work and how do they resonate with either of the themes? This statement will also guide our interview with you. (We will selectively interview participants about their perspective and upload the interview to the website. You may not want to be interviewed and that will be fine.) We may also ask you to submit a media object that best "embodies" your perspective (video, animation, text, a paper, software, etc.). We will upload these interviews and media objects to Breaking the Game web site. We will let you know when the website has been launched. </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">We will use these interviews and media objects to get dialogue and debate going. Each time a new object or text is submitted participants will be alerted through email. Or you can go to the website anytime.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Breaking the Game is similar to an online forum with the addition of multiple media objects and periodic opportunities for real time communication. We encourage you to think up new ways for interacting remotely. One participant, for example, wants to lead a "field trip" into a networked virtual world to explore some of his online projects. The participants in the symposium will meet there and discuss some of the issues by manipulating avatars and typing text, etc. This "field trip" will be recorded and uploaded as another media object. We want this symposium to be tied to real projects that feed into new practices. </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Finally all of these media objects will be ported to a 3D navigable space using the Quake III gaming engine and be available though the Virtual World of Art network. Here it will continue to take on another kind of life and experience. Others will be able to navigate and encounter the symposium's themes and continue to add text, media, etc. </DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">BREAKING THE GAME THEMES</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">“Hybridity” considers new forms of art being produced within the increasingly hybrid environment of digital and physical space, in response to the multiplication of delivery systems and formats, and to the changing roles of artists, scientists, and technologists. We will discuss whether or not, and under what conditions these hybrid contexts are effecting how we produce, with whom we collaborate, and with what results. How are we consuming art differently and integrating it into our lives in new ways? Finally we will explore a variety of hybrid experiments artists are undertaking within the now established field of video gaming and multiuser virtual environments.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">“Overclocking the City” proposes that we look at gaming technologies and culture as storehouses of tools for designing new perceptual experiences and social interaction within the built environment. We will debate what it means to have a public space in an electronically networked virtual world, and what forms this space might take. We’ll consider how virtual worlds, which for the most part, have been designed as autonomous environments, might have a functioning relationship with actual places, buildings, and people in physical locations.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 11px/normal Verdana; min-height: 13px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#383B3F"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">“The Virtual as Interface to Self and Society” explores the continuing and expanding importance technologies of sensing, computation, and display have in how we connect to society and simultaneously engage in acts of self-reflection and self-fashioning. Virtual worlds, and particularly networked pervasive 3D environments, are great contexts for imaginatively exploring how we project our so-called self into computerized space, reconstruct it in digital form, and set about interacting with other reconstructed selves. In combination with "computer software programs, rules, commands, and networked interactivity" we perform a sense of presence to others by manipulating "graphical, textual, navigational, and audio modes that are coded to correspond with our bodily senses" (Bolter). How is this self-presence achieved, to what ends, and with what effects? </FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">Organized by Workspace Unlimited: <A href="http://www.workspace-unlimited.org">http://www.workspace-unlimited.org</A></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><BR></FONT><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; ">______________________</SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; ">Wayne Ashley</SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; ">Workspace Unlimited</SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; ">Tel. +1 917-803-4420</SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; ">Skype: wayneashley</SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; ">Aim: zevluvxx</SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN> </DIV><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>