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<TITLE>Re: [iDC] Interactive City: irrelevant mobile entertainment?</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14.0px'>Hello all,<BR>
<BR>
Avidly may not be exactly the right word, but I have been following the ISEA2006/ZeroOne post-mortem as closely as I can. As usual, another bracing IDC discussion, which is most appreciated. I hope not to interrupt with a defensive response, but as director of ISEA2006 and ZeroOne, I do want to try and clarify a few points and voice some questions that I have as I read through the dialog as a participant. I realize that this starts at the beginning with some discussion that has progressed very far, but I have my own nagging doubts about the initial set up, or at least some of the apparent assumptions in response to it. Apologies in advance, if this gets a bit long, but will be going off the grid soon, for a while...<BR>
<BR>
In her initial post, On 8/13/06 4:54 PM, "kanarinka" <kanarinka@ikatun.com> wrote,<BR>
<BR>
"I wanted to post a nagging doubt I have in light of the title of the <BR>
ISEA conference theme "Interactive City" in conjunction with the <BR>
ZeroOne "Global Festival of Art on the Edge" and the artwork <BR>
showcased there. This is not a condemnation, more of a call to <BR>
reflection for myself (who participated in a project there) and <BR>
possibly for others. I would be interested to hear from others as to <BR>
their thoughts on this."<BR>
<BR>
Especially since more than 95% of the works presented at the Festival (I'll use this for shorthand ISEA2006 Symposium / ZeroOne San Jose) were juried in by more than 200 jurors, I think a reflection on what the results "mean," in general, is extremely worthwhile.<BR>
<BR>
At the same time, k also listed a specific subset of the approximately 32 Interactive City projects, the approximately 50 arguably "urban" projects, and the more than 200 projects presented at the Festival.<BR>
<BR>
- eating ice cream and singing karaoke<BR>
- calling an old person in San Jose to talk about whatever you might <BR>
have in common with them<BR>
- pressing a button on a machine and getting an artsy plane ticket <BR>
with your photo on it<BR>
- drifting through the city as if it were a sports field via applying <BR>
sports plays in urban space<BR>
- visualizing your social network via bluetooth as you go around the <BR>
conference and talk to your friends<BR>
- watching/listening to noise music made by people riding skateboards <BR>
around the conference<BR>
- listening to an erotic sci-fi narrative about san jose on your cell <BR>
phone while riding the train<BR>
- flipping light switches to make a one-word message in public space<BR>
- viewing colorful 3D representations of wireless digital data<BR>
<BR>
I would suggest that a different sentence about each of these projects could easily cast them in a much different, even critical, light for those who weren't in San Jose. More to the point, however, not listed were the following projects:<BR>
<BR>
- a telecommunications work between a Latino community in San Jose and residents of Mexico City<BR>
- a Neurocapital service in City Hall<BR>
- a community shrine in a local Vietnamese noodle shop<BR>
- an alt media version of CNN<BR>
- an interactive documentary of Iranian families in the Bay Area<BR>
- viewing the landscape along I5 through the filter of real time pollution readings<BR>
- directly messaging individual bluetooth devices "set to discoverable" to explicitly raise issues about and awareness of surveillance<BR>
- nomadic "spaces" that challenge and change perceptions and actual use of public space in San Jose<BR>
- neighborhood public radio<BR>
- linguistic analysis of language use by institutional websites<BR>
- a monolith with the concealed stories of different local and international communities<BR>
- cell phone-based noise sensors in the trees of public parks<BR>
- a tour of SV environmentally hazardous sites<BR>
- a film about government abuse in relation to crtical art practice<BR>
<BR>
My intent is not to get into dueling lists and certainly not to argue that play wasn't a major aspect of the Festival. It was. Only that there were many projects with a critical goal. How successful they were is certainly open to debate but not based on one sentence and assumptions about what a Festival in Silicon Valley must have been like.<BR>
<BR>
I think it's important to also debate some other issues, as well, however. <BR>
<BR>
As director, one of the explicit goals of the Festival was to draw the attention of a general public - not just specialists - to the remarkable work being done by artists in non-traditional media, shall we say, for now. Also, I am so tired of the media and art world trying to define "digital art" as this or that thing. Another explicit goal of the Festival was to show a real depth and breadth of practice from software to performance, from installations to outdoor spectacles, from "critical" to "playful" - and some that are both. But even if I had selected the works - or framed the calls - I would not have been interested, in this particular instance, in a Festival that presented _only_ explicitly critical works. As Anna Munster suggested, although perhaps not quite so positively:<BR>
<BR>
On 8/20/06 7:45 PM, "Anna Munster" <A.Munster@unsw.edu.au> wrote:<BR>
<BR>
"A better concept to descibe the conference, festival and I would say<BR>
probably the new media arts scene worldwide is: divergence. There is no<BR>
common thread to new media any more - there's interactive/VJing/remixing<BR>
cinema, there's electronic audio and spatialised sound experimentation,<BR>
there's the locative thing, the wireless thing, the locational (different<BR>
from locative), global/anti-global thing...etc etc etc."<BR>
<BR>
I can't and don't want to argue with people who were disappointed by the Festival - especially if they attended - but I think it's at least an interesting question how to build an informed and critical audience for the work that most people on this list participate in some way in the specific context of the United States, with its limited government funding of art, its limited funding of artists in general, its general lack of institutional support, its reflexive anti-criticality.<BR>
<BR>
____<BR>
<BR>
On 8/14/06 12:52 PM, "mollybh@netspace.net.au" <mollybh@netspace.net.au> wrote that the theme of the Interactive City was a "curatorial misfire" and suggested something more like "city as environment" might have been more appropriate.<BR>
<BR>
I don't want to take away from Eric Paulos and his team - of which I was a participant - who, I believe left the door wide open to and succesfully encouraged critical practice projects in relation to the city, but it is true that I, with Joel Slayton, established the initial "interactive city" framework. As some background, an inspiration for me in a very general way was Archigram's "Instant City" (1968), which is in the Edge Conditions show at the San Jose Museum of Art. In Archigram's playful way, they describe 6 "stages" for their imagined instant city in which an "airship visits a sleeping town": <BR>
<BR>
1. Before IC: A Sleeping Town<BR>
2. Descent<BR>
3. Event<BR>
4. Highest Intensity<BR>
5. Infiltration<BR>
6. Network Takes Over<BR>
<BR>
The key, for me, are stages 5 and 6. Can the ideas expressed by artists in ZeroOne infiltrate San Jose and take root at least as strongly as the corporatist ethos has?<BR>
<BR>
To be honest, if I had a hope for the generic theme of "interactive city," it was that it would somehow affect the residents of the city, not just the participants in the Symposium. I think to a remarkable degree it did. As Adriene Jenik wrote to this list about her project SPECLFLIC, "A large portion of my collaborators were young latino/as from the Bay and South Bay area <BR>
including local area performer/writers Praba Pilar and Melissa Lozano." And equally to the point, hundreds of residents dropped by and took in a form of cinema they would have never before countenanced - at least many of them - AND they "interacted" with each other and the participants. <BR>
<BR>
I realize that this "interact" is so big and so nebulous that is practically a gauntlet, but I was impressed that the city did seem to have a different character during the Festival week, and it wasn't all indoors, and it was different if not always explicitly critical, and it was "better." I am not so naive as to believe that a couple hundred artists can change San Jose in one week, but I do agree with Adriene, it wasn't about the technology but about a kind of engagement, which I _am_ optimistic enough to believe that with some judicious self-criticism could possibly infiltrate and take over in unexpected ways.<BR>
<BR>
And I do not agree with Anna when she writes<BR>
<BR>
On 8/20/06 7:45 PM, "Anna Munster" <A.Munster@unsw.edu.au> wrote:<BR>
<BR>
"However, that's symptomatic of the 'Festival' aspect of the event.<BR>
Festivals, like Biennale's, are now events that are pretty much external<BR>
to the local and the located - they are art imports that come in with lots<BR>
of talk of global, critiques even of the global and then precisely land<BR>
like a great big Airbus 380 and do their 'thang' wherever they happen to<BR>
dock"<BR>
<BR>
Despite the Instant City metaphor, I think the Festival was not just plop art. Over 40 local organizations participated, often in significant, programmatic ways. 20 local schools collaborated with 20 schools from Asia, Europe and Africa on our education programs. African-American girls made a documentary of the Festival. At least 5 projects were commissioned to work with local communities for a period of up to 2 years. And more. This is not to say their participation couldn't have been better highlighted or even greater, but it was both more general and more specific than a number of posts have suggested.<BR>
<BR>
_______<BR>
<BR>
On 8/14/06 1:25 PM, "Kevin Hamilton" <kham@uiuc.edu> wrote:<BR>
<BR>
"But don't they also often re-iterate an understanding of public space that revolves around permission and regulation, instead of around freedom, accountability, or justice? I'm also suspect of permission granted or grabbed through mobility,..."<BR>
<BR>
As I think about a possible 2008 ZeroOne, this is a critical issue. One of the things that Joel and I tried to do to mitigate this effect is to think of the Festival as a platform over which we by no means had control. We were a bit surprised, in fact, that more people didn't just show up and participate - or counter-participate. Ideas/criticisms as to why it didn't happen more? Suggestions as to how it might happen more?<BR>
<BR>
In the end, we have always seen ZeroOne as a beginning - part of an effort to bring both a set of artistic practices and critical thinking into public view – and participation. Hopefully, it can also be useful to practitioners and theorists. </SPAN></FONT>
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