In what can be referred to as the digital era, the proliferation of information technologies has brought about numerous conceptualisations of certain modes of interaction with digital materials. Many theorists have elaborated on an emerging digital culture and have outlined its principal components, such as interaction, participation and bricolage, or conceptualised the changing user roles it entails. While this is a broad set of conceptualisations, our specific area of interest in this paper is the digital audiovisual heritage field. The ways in which the often-theorised changing agent roles are evolving in practice within this field remains an important area of research. Indeed, according to conceptualisations of digital culture, in a field characterised by a growing awareness about safeguarding, digitising and distributing audiovisual materials, such developing modes of interaction might not only affect the way in which cultural heritage institutions manage collections and approach audiences, they might also obscure the traditional demarcation between consumer (user) and producer (provider) roles. The aim of this article is to go beyond mere theoretical reflections on digital culture and to look at whether any evidence from the digital audiovisual heritage field supports the theories at hand. In sum, it is our aim to assess whether findings regarding the case of audiovisual heritage truly hint at the emergence of digital culture in Flanders. To this end, findings originating from the BOM-VL research project (Archiving and Distribution of Multimedia in Flanders) will be elaborated to assess the extent to which digital culture, its principal components and changing agent roles have permeated the audiovisual heritage realm in Flanders (Belgium). More specifically, an analysis of both a panel discussion and in-depth interviews with educational, media and culture experts in Flanders, all conducted in the framework of BOM-VL, will be examined. In sum, research results in BOM-VL suggest that interacting with digital materials, i.e. engaging in the praxis of digital culture, is not evident for users and providers alike. Firstly, the extent to which active 'prosumers', 'bricoleurs' or 'produsers' of audiovisual heritage are indeed emerging in Flanders is not yet clear; however, experts deem the proportion of such users to still be small. Secondly, providers wishing to distribute audiovisual content into the digital realm appear to find remediation and contextualisation of content, necessary in order to facilitate participation and interaction, far from straightforward. Some of the project findings therefore certainly present an interesting starting point towards critical reflections on challenges agents within the digital audiovisual heritage field might face: the theoretical notion of digital culture and its principal components appears to be slightly problematic in the context of digital audiovisual heritage in Flanders. Finally, on a more wide-ranging level, the findings hint at the extent to which the broader notion of digital culture in all its aspects appears to be materialising in Flanders.  

Tartu University Library’s native language university digital book collection (Ebrary platform) was started in November, 2008. The main purpose of the collection is to provide university students and professors with an alternative method to reach necessary study materials in their native language through the Internet. Students do not need to worry about the lack of materials in libraries or bookstores. Professors can be sure that the students will come prepared and are well equipped. In addition, the option to submit feedback provides professors with a tool to amend previously published titles for the second edition. The long-term goal is to provide professors with a better understanding and basis for their rights and opportunities as authors.  In addition to digitalization of textbooks, Tartu University Library preserves Estonian textbooks through that collection.

Changing user: artificial culture

Room 243
12.00

Paranoid, not an android: dystopic and utopic expressions in playful interaction with technology and everyday surroundings

When I am king, you will be the first against the wall
With your opinion which is of no consequence at all
Radiohead – Paranoid Android – 1997

“One of the most important machines in our life is the computer, we agreed on that. We then thought about the role of the computer in our lives and what it is we use it for. […] The computer is a machine that makes human live easier. […] It plays a big part in our social life: ICQ, Skype and hotmail and a number of online forums are an example of this. After we’d thought about this, we came to the conclusion: the computer is man’s new best friend!“

“We see a computer screen with a man that apparently is trapped. He doesn’t look happy and his hands are around the bars. Why is there a man trapped behind the computer screen? […] For some people the realisation that they’re caught up in a virtual world comes too late. That’s why they’re alienated from the normal, real world, making it impossible for them to function normally.”

These two quotes demonstrate different positions that bachelor students in Media & Entertainment Management take regarding the technology that surrounds their everyday life. They sometimes display a concern with the pervasiveness of computers and media, along with a concern for the convergence of human bodies with computer technology. At the same time they focus on the more positive aspects such as the registration of donors with a chip in a person’s body.

What philosophical notions of utopia and dystopia are intertwined with their concerns over and their joy of technology? In a creative reflection assignment titled, “The world, your playground”, students in Media & Entertainment Management (@Stenden university, The Netherlands) reflected on a range of topics. Students were invited to actively engage in philosophical thinking, by challenging their assumptions about this world in a creative manner. The assignment itself yielded surprising results as students spontaneously used the opportunity to not just ‘study’ this world, but to also voice their concerns about it in a playful, creative way.

An analysis of these expressions is warranted because a) these students belong to a new generation of future media makers and managers that will play a role in the further dissemination of several forms of entertainment and pop-culture,
and b) these students form an “in between” generation that will have to connect the lives of people that knew a time before the internet to the lives of people that will be growing up in a truly cross medial timeframe.

The assignments selected for this paper focus on technology and new media. The creative expressions students came up with are analyzed from a philosophical viewpoint. Different stances toward technology from a philosophical perspective are connected to the performative aspects of playfulness.

Theorizing Web 2.0: including local to become universal

Recent studies have been focusing on exploring web 2.0 and social networking tools are popular research subjects for scholars. Most of these studies use different conceptual and methodological instruments, which however are not always universal. In this exploratory paper, we would like to take a look at general theories about cyberspace and cyberculture from a different aspect. In particular, we want not only to highlight arguments about the universality of recent theories in means of social interaction by looking at them through a local window, but also to draw a general perspective of current internet use in Turkey.

In sum, our aim in this paper is to see whether cyberspace theories which are mostly constructed through analyzing of western based web sites are compatible in terms of functioning with their local homologues.
To this end, we will try to make a typology of Turkish web sites which are using web 2.0 applications and question to which point the recent web 2.0 literatures fit into them.  As a consequence, the aim of this paper is double. On the one hand, we desire to catch up with recent universal web and internet studies, a domain mostly neglected in Turkey, and on the other hand, we try to question the practice of theorizing internet. As Erick Davis states, cyberspace is still under construction and therein lies its strength, the more we analyze and observe it in our own way, the better it will get shaped.

How Web 3.0 combines user-generated and machine-generated content

"In this paper we examine the changing role of the user in view of the cultural transformation from user to 'produser' by Web 2.0 and which changes we might expect from Web 3.0. Web 2.0, the current phase of the World Wide Web and online applications, is characterized by interactive and dynamic content. Web 3.0 is assumed to comprise the following opportunities: a hybrid, semantic and intelligent web made possible by the convergence of several new technologies, which will make data and content more usable and better accessible. Guided by the perspectives of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, this paper examines to what extent Web 3.0 and in particular recommendations engines will deliver user-generated, machine-mediated content, and which implications this has for cultural participants. Therefore we use the final research findings from the IBBT  research project CUPID (Cultural Profile and Information Database), which started in 2008 and will end in December 2009. In this research project several partners searched for innovative ways to aggregate, categorise, personalise and distribute cultural content in order to give end users a rich cultural experience.

The outcomes of the literature studies on the key concepts of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 will be used to discuss the shift from user-generated to machine-generated content, namely the recommendations of cultural events as developed in the CUPID model. In this model, the end user has the possibility to manage and control the information about his cultural participation, supported by the cultural institutions he chooses. As a result, the end user creates his own cultural profile that he can use as a tool to receive personalised recommendations from cultural institutions by means of openID. The aim of this process of profiling and recommending is the reduction of the abundance of online cultural information. In our paper we use the findings from different series of focus group conversations with external experts (technological experts and conceptual experts), cultural mediators (umbrella organisations, cultural organisations, media, cities & municipalities and social networks & weblogs) and end users to reflect on the possible opportunities and risks of machine-generated content. On the one hand, the future of the web will not only consist of user-generated content, but also of data mining, data analysing and processing this data, completed with metadata, to provide the user with the opportunities of personalised content and recommendations. On the other hand, it raises questions about a possible substitution of an abundance of information by an abundance of recommendations, about a possible decrease of supply and about the privacy of the end user. In this paper we will focus on the changing role of the user throughout the shifts from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and its influence on cultural participation.

Artificial culture as metaphor and tool

Human societies reorganize both the surrounding environment and themselves. As a result, society is becoming more and more artificial. The driving force behind this process is constantly renewing technologies that are developed to increase human welfare. One characteristic of technological development is that it moves inwards from the outside world: closer to man, closer to the intimate core of an individual. Technology has moved from the reorganization of the physical environment to manipulation of man’s biological body, genome and consciousness. There is only one more border area to colonize - the cultural resources of mankind. The culture that we have always considered man’s naturally evolved environment should be redefined as an artificial environment with countless opportunities.

The idea of treating culture as an object of technology comes from the development of technologies and society. Achievements in the field of information technology provide a technological basis for the creation of a civilization with an artificial culture. Technical metaphors are extended to culture. Contemporary communication and information theories offer attractive metaphors for redefining cultural phenomena. Such a linguistic shift is extremely important. In principle, the idea of correcting culture is no different from the idea of improving a computer program. New programs are created for new tasks, and the more the programs are improved, the more new opportunities will arise – which will again create new tasks.

Culture is a phenomenon that concerns humans alone. If humans are the creators of culture in a direct or indirect way, then how can we speak about artificial culture? If for us the word “artificial” means something created by humans, then the whole of culture is artificial. Nevertheless the real situation is not at all so simple. The relationship between humans and culture is very complicated. On the one hand, humans create culture, but at the same time culture designs humans. The cultural reality seems to exist apart from the individual person. We all live within culture, but every one of us is quite limited in our ability to direct and influence it. Cultural information is being forwarded from person to person and from generation to generation without anyone intentionally directing it. So, culture is similar to language. Fundamentally, natural language has been created by humans. Every person can invent words. At the same time, language is something more and is somehow given to humans. It is the same with culture. We can create some parts of culture, but culture as such has been given to us. In many ways, the cultural process is similar to the natural one. Humans have not consciously initiated it, nor do they design it. We do not know exactly how the development of culture is dependent on human activity.

Our approach involves the design of artificial cultures as environments in which participants (residents of this particular culture) interact  with each other, thus forming a problem-solving and role-playing community. Although the culture is simulated, individual participants and interactions are real. Artificial cultures present innovative circumstances in which the participants’ consequent interaction patterns and group behaviour can be studied. Methodology is based on artificially created fictional cultures in which people can participate by running experiments, testing different strategies, and building a better understanding of the aspects of the real world that the artificial culture depicts.

Artificial culture methodology will be used in three different ways:
•    as a research tool
•    in a specific intervention process, as an experimental environment, in which researchers and participants can make conceptual and instrumental inferences for real decision making and policy making
•    as a learning tool

We think we could use artificial cultures to test a wide variety of questions about how the culture works. As inherently social environments, they have been singled out as ideal test-beds for social and cultural experimentation because they emulate real society for genuine interactions between people. Areas in which the methodology of an artificial culture can easily be applied are modelling the interaction between cultures, the division of cultures into subcultures, how they influence each other, and modelling the formation of hybrid societies. The given methodology can be used to play through alternative scenarios in culture evolution and carry out experiments of the “what will happen if…” type. Investigating cultural variety, which especially characterises modern societies, dealing with cultural conflicts, collisions, competition and invasion, are particularly relevant and attractive topics. All these problems are vitally important in contemporary societies. Moreover, we may find that artificial culture will change our perspective an anthropology, changing not just our subject matter, tools and methods, but our theory, philosophy, and the very questions we ask.

In this paper, we presented a learning-centred artificial culture “DigiKult”, the purpose of which is to analyse the problems of contemporary informational society.

Changing user: political citizen

Room 243
13.30

The playing citizen - Play and cultural change in a global era    

Starting with Neil Postman’s dark vision of TV entertainment culture in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Anikó Imre explores the notion of play and game as “tools in explaining cultural change” (2009). The notion of play allows her to capture the recent combination of “ludification” of post-communist consumer culture and the phenomenon of global media convergence. The paper employs her notion of play and explores its potential in the concrete Estonian context of cultural change and play culture at the intersection of post-communist past and globalization. Imre concentrates her analysis on media content and different mediated social movements, whereas the focus of this paper is on the audience side and its playful way of perceiving citizenship, belonging and public connection.

Empirically the paper draws on online diaries written by Estonian students from Tallinn, Tartu and Narva over a two month period, as well as 40 in-depth interviews conducted independently from the diaries. The empirical material reveals playful skills of the participants to bridge the gape between the unwillingness of labelling themselves as being seriously politically interested and the continuation of a public connectedness with a broader sphere beyond the private.                                                                                                                               

Governments in virtual worlds: Estonian and Swedish embassies in Second Life

There are both similarities and differences when comparing the projects of the two nations. Public authority Swedish Institute (SI), with only loose connections to the Foreign Ministry of Sweden, manages the Swedish embassy. The task of the Swedish Institute is to market Sweden to people and institutions abroad. The Foreign Ministry of Estonia, on the other hand, manages the Estonian embassy. And while the accurate function of the Swedish Embassy in Second Life was to create an image of Sweden as a fresh and bold nation that goes against the stream. and thus the most important matter was what happened outside Second Life, in international news coverage of the virtual embassy, the Estonian embassy in Second Life had stronger ambitions to work with government issues within the virtual environment. Both embassy projects also put forward the internal learning processes of experimenting with new platforms and textual formats.

This presentation explores and compares the establishment and management of the two virtual embassies. Intentions of the two embassy projects, work processes, functions and environments, branding (including architecture and aesthetics) and activities and events in the virtual environments are analysed, as well as the relation with the ongoing media coverage and the in-world communities in Second Life.

Re-imagining the notions of userhood and citizenship in a globalising world

Today, user-based content on the one hand, and emergent prosumer cultures with characteristic open-source, remix-remake and cooperation practices on the other, have become quite common discussion themes in a wider cultural conversation on effects of globalisation processes on our increasingly technologically remediated, interlinked and interdependent lives, cultures and societies. This global meta-conversation encompasses – though not exclusively –many other more specialised discourses and conversations regarding whether it is feasible or not to expect citizens of many different types, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, gender-orientations, and ages, in all strata of society, to be guaranteed access to, interaction with, and real engagement in forms of local, “glocal” and global democracy, that require active participation in planning, decision-making and governance processes at many different levels of complexity and perceived relevance for those involved.

One pressing issue in this connection is how the right kinds of competencies, knowledge and relational skills necessary for such forms of participatory democratic action are to be acquired in the most efficacious and accessible ways by all parties involved. Traditional education has not always, it seems, been quite up to the mark in this respect. In this kind of highly complex situation, the notion of moral agency may be of use as a way of mediating between traditional determinist and indeterminist positions associated with the issue of Free Will. If we take agency in general as the ability to motivate and instantiate actual events and processes in the world through concrete forms of action or activity, no moral dimension regarding decisions to motivate or instantiate these actions is necessarily implied. This may cause problems when seeking to build and maintain global cooperation relationships across a wide range of sociocultural value system divides.

Moral Agency, on the other hand, is bound to our particular existential condition as human beings able to reflect upon, and make conscious decisions about, how we ought, or ought not act in any given decision-making situation that leads us, or others – and this may also regard both natural and artificial forms of agentive otherness – to perform some form of action. This is, of course, especially important when we take part in decision making processes that may produce actions with far wider, possibly traumatic, consequences not only for ourselves, but for many other co-present or non co-present forms of otherness – for people, places, artefacts, animals, organisms in many other parts of the globe.

In my contribution, based on some recent, internationally published work of mine in this area with copious reference to past and present research in relevant scientific domains, I shall examine, by way of specific examples, to what extent active participation in the ideation, creation and sharing of user-generated content in fictional possible worlds of online games like World of Warcraft, simulated virtual worlds like Second Life, Twinity and There, social networking environments like Facebook and Twitter, and other forms of cooperative action at a distance, can serve to help us develop more “glocal” identities, more better able to conceive of, and participate in sound moral agency terms, in our contemporary pluralistic democracies in complex ideation, planning and decision-making processes.

Habermasian rational critical debate on-line: Transforming political culture. The case study of mailing list “For Honest Politics“, Latvia, 2007

Different recent researches about technology-driven transformation of democratic pubic sphere have shown different and sometimes even contradicting results trying to give a normative conclusion whether deliberative characteristics of communication on the Internet has encouraged the potential of democracy and civic participation in Habermasian public sphere, or – vice versa – the easily accessible platform of „all-to-all” conversation on some extent has led to fragmentation, anarchy and degradation of media as mobilizing agents for political participation.

If this rational critical debate has moved to easily accessible dynamic on-line environment, it transforms the model of orientations to political action – respectively, the political culture.

The particular case study researches the rational critical debate in the mailing list “For Honest Politics!”, which was created by several Latvian media representatives, business persons, intellectuals and oppositional politics aiming to coordinate the actions of civil engagement protesting against the government’s wish to sack the chief of anti-corruption office. The research focuses on the discourse analysis of texts posted by mailing list participants, later the results are correlated with interviews of participants and political communication experts about the off-line impact of this debate.

Changing user: space

Ruum 243
15.30

Playing with computers in urban space: aesthetic-medial dimensions.

Until now, when describing the key characteristics of digital culture and explaining the fascination of computer-generated worlds, the focus has been on the borderless horizons of exhaustless simulation processes. The most recent developments however encompass mobile, networked computer game arrangements that deploy a plethora of new medial practices in urban space. These new formats represent ludic forms of using information and communication technologies that connect aspects of art, play, design and entertainment in order to create innovative and participatory spaces of possibility.

The paper describes these new aesthetic situations as mediated environments and their production, as well as reception as medial practices, using the work of projects such as Blinkenlights (Berlin, Paris) and Urban Eyes (Amsterdam, London) as examples.  Medial practices and mediated environments.  A key method of current cultural science is to approach media not only as an element of technological communications systems, but also as an element of medial practices. This leads to a multiplication of perspectives, because medial practices can be found in the entirety of culture as political, technical, aesthetic, artistic, scientific and social activities. This marks a shift in the focus of research: the central question is not what media are or how they function in isolated experimental arrangements, but how we act with media from within the fullness of an eventful situation. A prime example for this line of inquiry is the question of how we organise the border traffic between the possible and the real, on the one hand, and the impossible, utopian and the marvellous, on the other.

'Mediated environments' refer to multi-medially constructed spaces of experience, within which the aspect of movement is of special significance. Bodily engagement and dynamic sensory affordances are needed to bring the reality of the audience and the performed actuality of the mediated environment into a state of flow. Multidimensional structures of communication and space emerge as soon as pictures, texts, sounds and the participants are put into motion, that undermine closed and rigid boundaries as well as governing distinctions.

Blinkenlights
On September 11th, 2001 the famous 'Haus des Lehrers' (house of the teacher) building at Berlin Alexanderplatz became the world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights. During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic 'Pong' on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own love letters on the screen as well (http://www.blinkenlights.net/blinkenlights).

Installations like Blinkenlights are invitations to play in the public area. It motivates new forms of participation and engagement in the design of public space and experiments with different kinds of connecting real and virtual spheres.

Urban Eyes
Urban eyes is a service combining 2 natural networks, the CCTV and the pigeon population in a city to provide an alternative view on the city. It is a way of exploring the possibilities of new information technologies and to experiment with alternative modes of usage.

Re-creating 'natural' heritage. Landscape perception and outdoor tourism in the web 2.0

This project sprouts with one initiative – in March 2009, an organized group of hikers were asked to take some pictures of the nicest, of the most unpleasant and of the most typical images during some outdoor walks in Galicia (northwest Spain). The aim of this project was to document how hikers perceive landscape in order to search the tourist possibilities of this region. Alain Roger (Court traité du paysage) says that the landscape is not neutral but a social construction, a way of viewing and experiencing a territory that acquires a sense to the person by using some socially given artistic patterns. For us the question was if the tourism promotion of the region was based on images and representations with sense, emotionally exciting for the visitors – some similarities but also divergences where found out.

This experience showed us that the way a territory is perceived and represented (landscape) by tourism promoters was not the same that the 'ones' given by the hikers. Hikers were paying attention to elements, in some cases, also used in tourism promotion and in local museums, but, in other cases, to new ones. Some months later we have used this initial experience to elaborate a plan of outdoor tourism promotion based on the web 2.0. Some contextualization is here needed: hiking in Galicia is characterized by three facts: (i) as popular outdoor activity is relatively new in Galicia due to the lack of walking tradition (or the rejection of this tradition till nowadays), (ii) the existing hiking routes have a shortage of maintenance and of information, (iii) visitors are often giving a different value to the territory (creating a landscape), and sometimes, contradictory to the value attributed by the tourism promoters.

The basic ideas are: (i) to move the information on the hiking routes to a web accessible to the general public, (ii) to turn the visitor into the main generator of representations of territory (from user/tourism consumer to creator) by sharing pics, avoiding institutional promotion and representations, (iii) to create a feedback service between users, inhabitants, and tourism promoters, redefining landscape. The tools used for those purposes are: Wikiloc, Panoramio and Wikipedia. Our goals are to contribute: (i) to build between visitors and tourism promoters a hiking culture and route net in Galicia, (ii) to redefine landscape to be attractive as outdoor tourist resource helping to the preservation of heritage (what elements of the 'natural' heritage-forests, historical roads and tracks, peasant architecture…) are in danger due the lack of perception of their value, (iii) to the creation of a tourism with low environmental impact, and (iv) to detect whatever may be newly considered heritage of interest and what elements of actual perception of landscape and heritage may be in risk of disappearance.

Conspicuous consumption of virtual space in Iran

Internet as a highest and biggest sample of advancement in informational and communicational world provides lots of opportunities for organizations, social groups and ordinary people due to freely available use with different forms. In other words, virtual space is a kind of widespread space which is being consumed in different levels and forms. This article tries to study consumption of virtual space in Iran in a critical view, using the well-known theories of consumption discussed by Veblen, Bourdieu, Simmel and Baudrillard and the concept of "society of the spectacle" discussed by Guy Debord. It argues that regardless of type, extent and quality of access to the internet – which can be discussed in its own importance by consumption theories – the circumstances of virtual space consumption have various significations which indicates that it can be used to fulfil human real and false demands.
In other words we can say that consuming virtual space can be defined in two signifying levels: 1. significations derived from type, extent and quality of access to the virtual space in actual space and 2. significations of virtual space consuming itself.

It is really important not to forget that consuming virtual space should not just be limited to its function in the audience sphere, but more importantly producers of virtual texts (such as websites and web logs) are a sort of producers of virtual texts consuming virtual space (i.e. virtual space is being consumed by organizations, social groups and individuals in order to produce different texts).
The present article concludes that virtual space consumption in Iran regardless of its positive functions, to a great extent is a big space for spectacle, conspicuous and construction of distinction and social prestige which is being expanded in both actual and virtual spaces.

Cultural heritage: visuality

Room 186
12.00
  

Power, Interaction and Cultural Competence in Technologically-Mediated Interactive Art Exhibitions

Computer-based interactive art exhibitions are offering new ways of experiencing the arts, particularly through notions of public engagement. It is often assumed that there is a 'correct' or 'fulfilling' way of experiencing such exhibitions, usually through some kind of performative action directed towards the exhibit and/or other visitors to the museum or gallery. In order to gain a 'fulfilled' experience the visitor's role has been transformed from passive observer to actively engaged participant, but in becoming part of the exhibition themselves, the visitor is objectified.

Visitors may have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, such interactivity has the potential to create a truly deep and enduring experience: being a part of the artwork oneself. On the other hand, it can cause feelings of self-consciousness or shyness that distract the visitor or make it difficult for them to relax and enjoy looking around. Furthermore, gallery staff may decide that the visitor needs support and guidance, and approach them to explain how to interact with the exhibit 'correctly'. Thereafter the visitor is expected to interact not only with the artwork but also with the staff, in a real time, 'live', face to face social encounter. This in turn creates an asymmetrical power structure which increases the perceived pressure to experience the artwork in the 'correct' way.

I will report preliminary findings from an EPSRC-funded project being conducted in Brighton, UK, using ethnographic data from questionnaires, qualitative field-notes and observations of visitors' behaviour. This is intended to provide an insight into both the socio-material order of a gallery and the staff's intervention in gallery-goers visits. The findings will be analysed with reference to Bourdieu's concepts of cultural competence and habitus. For Bourdieu, cultural competence was essential for what he called the ';lovers of Art';: experiencing the arts was a coded process, in that people's understandings and interpretive meanings were dependent on their levels of social and cultural capital, which in turn reflected their competence in a specific context such as the art world.

However, I will view this from a broader perspective, arguing that insofar as the cultural competences required are perceptual and cognitive, those that the contemporary museum requires are also visible throughout our everyday lives. Thus although, there are no absolutely 'correct' ways of experiencing interactive artworks, it is nevertheless important to ask whether our skills and competences from everyday life are compatible with those required in the context of museums and galleries. Indeed, if the latter do not require distinct forms of knowledge and competence, then why create the pressure to acquire them?
 

"What’s on your mind?"   

What’s on your mind? As the welcome sentence on Facebook, this lecture is a presentation on the current role and potential of social networks on museums’ webs. They’re designing online another museum space, with its own characteristics and also enabling interaction between the user, visitor and this public space.

From a marketing point of view of the relational and communicational phenomenon and considering a few examples around the world, we’ll see how one lives with the art in the everyday life."

What do we know about on-line museums? A study on the current situation of virtual art museums

The increasing investment in R&D concerning virtual museums (VM) in the last years attests a concrete interest of the cultural market to enlarge and promote the offer of innovative museum services founded on the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). By invoking ICT in the very conception of museum services, we definitely affect the technological paradigm that underlies the cultural and/or patrimonial and/or educational intention of the museum. Indeed, by means of ICT, the museum material and role espouse new forms and functions insofar as not only objects but also representations of objects and even virtual creations can henceforth be considered as an exhibition material. Consequently, we observe that the massive diffusion and the domestication of new technologies lead to novel practices. These changes were so quick that the first notion of VM became rapidly uncertain by allowed superpositions, bridgings, hybridizations, mutations, associations, etc. of traditional museum practices.

In our paper we precisely try to contribute to a better understanding of the diversity and the evolution of the notion of VM. This last is tried through a critical overview of some current R&D trends of on-line museums. We are especially concerned by virtual art museums.

We studied a corpus of one hundred virtual art museums on the basis of recurrent classification principles (noticeably, the design, the type of information given, how this information is presented, some ergonomic aspects, the specific uses of ICT that enrich them with a real added value, etc.). We thus arrived to three basic categories of VM: real museums websites, thematic museums and conceptual museums, to which it is convenient to add the special (even if somehow rare) category of meta-museums. We try to characterize them precisely and we specify the innovative part of each type of museum. We then investigate their cultural potential, and discern interesting subcategories. We also naturally try to find some evidence concerning the relationships between these VM categories and subcategories. We then search to qualify the room left between these categories for further R&D and discover three secondary VM types: real branch museums, art reconstructions and Second Life museums. We try to unify these categories, prime and secondary, by virtue of some structuralism principles.

We notice that there is a major disproportion between the different categories of VM, which may be explained from the fact that VM were initially born as showcases of real museums (more than ¾ in our corpus). This influence has drastically limited the creation of other types of VM. In fact, real museums’ websites have 'imposed' a pre-established vision about the way the collections have to be exhibited and the information has to be presented. Moreover, they circumscribed the VM creativity in a somehow rigid economical model. Nevertheless, the idea of VM has since considerably evolved; not only because ICT evolve, but also because of a shift of the market, that gradually incorporates new cultural and social practices.

New Representation Boundaries and the Design of Digital Cultural Interfaces

This paper comments on the broad field of representational possibilities that digital technology has brought to the interpretation of cultural assets and the design of digital cultural interfaces; i.e. the way in which we interact with digital representations and cultural information. To address the idea of ‘new representation boundaries’, the paper draws on the context of digital attributes: variability, modularity and transcoding (Manovich 2001), and it also considers three important study lines that are implicit in the topic: Information Design (clear graphical and meaningful representation of information), Interface Design (system or artefact used to interact with a product), and Interactive Design (experiences between people and artefacts).

Three Paradigms
Information Design deals with the appropriate organization and presentation of data that can be converted into knowledge by the users. It also encompasses the creation of icons and visual structures, with a deep implication of analysis, organization and transformation of these visuals to significant facts. It seeks to produce a significant visual communication with the users, and through design. Info Design is not only an aesthetic representation, but, indeed, a functional framework that can codify and de-codify information contained on visual icons; these representations can be set – as a system of signs that displays awareness of facts and information.

The visual structures within a digital project are the shape of the ‘Interface’ – the place where users and digital artefacts connect –“[the structure] …that mediates between complex technological devices and their users” (Krippendorff, 2006, 8). Interfaces in digital environments can be either a physical, or a symbolic object; or even a set of instructions (e.g. a website, a software, a system, a tool); a ‘something’ one cans accesses or processes ‘something else’.

Interface Design has several configurations, and those depend most of the time on the project structure and tasks set for it. These configurations can range from structures such as input and output methods, through different tools and technologies, to navigation metaphors and narratives. One of the basic embodiments of an Interface is the concept of Navigation, the way of getting through the new media artefacts, the perception of being in a place and the possibility to move around that digital space. It is the mapping of the virtual world to explore.

Digital art in teaching

Room 186
14.30                                     

Robot: Ritual Oracle and Fetish

With the ever unfolding and amazing propagation of technology, human beings are provoked and convinced of technology’s magic-like abilities. Laptops serve as animistic power fetishes and latter-day Ouija boards. Cell phones are talismanic communicators with the power to capture and hold time, space, and images with enough mojo to interact with an unseen world and others. The web is a mana machine, an ethereal pathway to other times and places, a portal to an intangible spirit world that portends a collective oneness. Synthetic chemicals, drugs, and medical devices are our latter-day herbs, potions, and juju formerly served up by a shaman. Talk and acceptance of the invisible to the unaided eye, sprite-like DNA and nano are commonplace. Biotech and advanced warfare has bequeathed god-like powers onto humans. We are surrounded by the digital spirits that fill the airwaves and conjure and shape, like a séance, our daily lives into existence. Nothing is beyond the bounds of possibility. The technological promise land is within our reach and it is a dazzling place of perfectibility and hope that routinely makes commonplace fantastic offerings of the once unimaginable. We humans no longer live with technology. Like the gods and forces of old, humans now live within the system of technology. The mythic, ritual and religious patterns of former human eras are over but the persistent biological longing for salvation and fear of death has only taken another form—techno-salvationism is the force of our era.

The future, once the domain of prophets, oracles, and visionaries, is ever more tangible, and as every culture yearns for fulcrum of expression, so are we. AI driven conversational robots are made in the image of humans; robots are the vector creatures of the future-present. These robots, now in prototype, are positioned to provide the pathway between technology and humanity, a reflexive, ritual-religious unitary expression on which we inscribe the fears and hopes of our evolution.

Robots, long a figment of fiction and imagination are becoming a new species, now tangibly gestating, begot of human effort, will and need. Conversational, interactive robots, with flesh-like skin, human facial expressions, vision tracking, vocal recognition, synthesis, and speech, upgradeable software, animations, sensors, databases and personalities are set to evolve beyond the sum of their parts. Conversational, human-like robots crisscross psychological, ethical, and philosophical boundaries and soon questions of responsibility, relationship and sentience will be upon us—is a robot a mere expression, container, and medium of humanity? When AI pushes a robot beyond its input, what does it become? No longer relegated to machine other, they are becoming more human-like with recognizable actions and characteristics evoking emotion and reaction. They are us and like us, potentially über-human, but always a link bespeaking both technology and humanity. Humans have long talked to, sacrificed and died for the figures of gods, spirits and ancestors that were avatars of larger, unseen and potent worlds, myths, and belief systems. Such fetishes have, since the beginning of our species, efficiently held and coded human longing, fear, and desire. Humanity has dreamed this robot moment into existence. Having long lived with technology, it now has a voice and is talking back.                                                                                       

The Freire Social Media Project: Social Media for Social Justice Education

Bridging the digital gap; between schools and communities, rich and poor neighbourhoods, young people and seniors, is impossible without the partnership of schools, universities, and communities. There are many community projects created in low-income boroughs across Canada with high-school dropouts or gang members; how can university students and professors work with the community leaders and participants to help develop their skills and motivate them to go back to school or help them enter the workforce? There are many ways to approach these issues, and one of them is through social media interaction. Using social media, we can enhance their skills while producing critical and meaningful media. To eradicate the gap, each body and group must bring forward their specific knowledge and work together to foster a successful partnership and project.

As a way to research and work with young people, schools, and communities, a project was founded in 2007. The Freire Social Media Project is a social media education initiative that explores learning and living in an era of media convergence in an effort to understand the role of social media and its impact on youth culture. The FSMP is also a laboratory for evolving pedagogical practice for students, teachers, community leaders, and members at large. The main goal of the project is to work with young people and social media to develop their critical thinking skills, transferable skills, competencies and affordances. Its philosophy is based on Paulo Freire's work; he believed that students should be asked what they want to learn, and that the learning should be a collaborative cultural synthesis.

The FSMP is part of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy founded by the late Canada Research Chair in Critical Pedagogy, Professor Joe L. Kincheloe and current director Professor Shirley R. Steinberg. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy is dedicated to building an international critical community which works to promote social justice for those who are marginalized. The Freire Project  is committed to conducting and sharing critical research with local and international educators working in social, political, and educational contexts around the world. It promotes research in critical pedagogy, and brings together local and international educators and is committed to continuing the global development of critical pedagogy and to highlighting its relevance with marginalized and indigenous peoples.

The FSMP is led by Giuliana Cucinelli, and includes graduate student collaborators who lead workshops and various sessions for the young participants of the project. The objective of the FSMP is to work with marginalized and indigenous youth using social media to encourage them to build their skills and motivate them to continue their studies, or other proactive short and long-term goals. More specifically, the objectives are for participants use social media within a critical framework, produce youth social media productions, and then be able to critically think about the message and the medium they have chosen,, and to critically reflect on the entire experience.  Each week, the participants meet with the project leader either at the community centre in their neighbourhood or at the university. The social impact of the FSMP is to improve living and educational conditions for disenfranchised youth. However, this requires a rigorous work ethic and dedication to examine the complexity of the participants' lived world: class, gender, education, socio-political beliefs, ethnicity, race, sexuality, religion, family, etc. Another specific goal of this project is to facilitate students, educators and community leaders/members to produce work, which explore issues related to civic identities in a participatory learning environment.

The FSMP creates the groundwork to continue to understand and promote the knowledge and experiences of marginalized youth and indigenous peoples through the use of social media and critical pedagogy. The research project is significant because it specifically works with urban youth who struggle within the educational system, and does so through digital participatory learning based in social media. The ethos of the FSMP is to provide an organic experience for the participants and group leaders. Therefore, the timeline and projects are constantly in flux to adapt to the participants' schedules, motivation, and interest.  The St. Raymond FSMP began in March 2009 and ran until June 2009, and the La Maison des Jeunes de la Côte-des-Neiges FSMP ran from July to August, 2009. We are currently engaged in the third phase with local Hip-Hop youth.
 
The participants work with various social media to create a variety of media products: personal Websites, blogs, vlogs, digital photovoice projects, digital self-portraits, remixes/mashups, wikis, and short documentaries/portraits. All of these projects are posted and made available on the participants' personal Websites, as well as on media sharing Websites, such as YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, Facebook, etc. Each project has a specific goal, and certain skills that are explored. Each project has specific goals, and is always oriented to working with social justice messages. Equally important is to create the projects in a Freirian manner, therefore the participants are encouraged to develop work that they are familiar with and interested in. The FSMP also encourages its participants to produce work, which connects with young people's lives. For example, one of the major 'problems' in St. Raymond borough is graffiti.  With the FSMP participants could look at graffiti more closely and explore why, through media representation, it is seen as a problem and not as an art form. They could explore this topic with a photovoice project, and delve deeper into graffiti as a form of expression, as a style of urban art, and as poetry for the artist. Issues of power, representation, and social-economic could also be examined to understand graffiti as street/gang art.  The work produced by the participants has a message, often tied to social, political, and global issues. Once their projects are complete and posted on their personal Websites, the conversation continues with a global audience. The participants are encouraged to reach out and attract feedback from people around the world by engaging in community blogs and discussions. They are also encouraged to use social media as a way to connect with other young people. They are asked to inquire how certain topics are seen and / or represented in our locations. For example how is graffiti seen in Germany, Jamaica, Australia, Africa, etc. Does it symbolize and have the same connotations as in St. Raymond? As their critical thinking skills are developed, so too are other transferable skills and competencies, such as evaluating a situation, researching, writing, solving problems, etc. Overall these projects are meant to engage youth through an interest-based method so that they can explore important issues while staying motivated and interested. 

Digital art and children's formal and informal practices: Exploring curiosities and challenging assumptions

This paper explores art education with children of secondary school age in the UK, where digital technologies are being increasingly used by students to make artefacts. It addresses the following questions:
1. Is formal art education premised upon assumptions about what art should be and the sorts of processes that should be involved in learning to make art ?
2. What are the artistic practices that children and teachers are engaging in with digital technology both in and out of school?
3. Does engagement with digital technology in making art offer a kind of bridge between formal and informal practices of making ?

In exploring these questions the paper draws on literature from the fields of art education, art history, from literature relating to innovation in education, and from research into formal and informal learning with digital technologies. The study, based in a local school, involved observations of children's digital making processes, both in curriculum art projects and in time outside of taught sessions, joint planning of intervention activities that would allow us to gain insights into the making processes that children used, reflective interviews with teachers and students, and collections of children's artwork both digital and non-digital.
Early findings have led to some unexpected and surprising results and assumptions about children as makers of digital art were very much challenged. The tensions that could have been assumed to exist between school art and informal art, although present, did not necessarily manifest themselves in the way that might have been expected. The key difference  between children and teachers was not related primarily to differences in expertise, as much of the literature on digital childhoods might imply, but to children and teachers having different understandings of the process of making art. For example, children's art would often begin with a process of imitating the sorts of imagery, and its associated techniques, that they admired and was available to them in online spaces. School art, on the other hand, would often begin with gathering ideas from 'primary' sources, which would develop into individual artworks. Children would often begin making by disrupting the sorts of methods of use that are built into certain types of digital tools, leading to some curious activity which highlighted the limits of the tools that schools assume that children will have an affinity for. Digital tools in the school art department, I suggest, highlight a boundary area between formal and informal practices that might already have existed. If digital technologies allow the seepage of one into the other, it challenges many old and new ideas that are held about children and teachers as makers of artefacts.
               
                                          

Screen As Site of Performance: Body Coded in Motion

This paper examines the digitally mediated interactions between the analog entity of the human body and its digital representations. For the purpose of my research I navigate the screen as a fuzzy border that engages constant transition: offline-to-online, signal-to-sample, analog-to-digital. We live in an era where human motion becomes accelerated by technology and the points of stopping, looking, observing are rare commodities. Nowadays 'new technologies become extensions of the human body and as such influence its identity.' I will start from the premise that 'a computer machine and a computer program can be whatever a programmer wants it to be' and for that reason 'possibility exists to create new paradigms of computer programming that build on humankind's inherent visual and bodily perception skills.' The pioneer in the field of embodied aesthetics of new media, Myron Krueger believes that the computer is always a vehicle for exploring and expanding embodied (human) interaction with the world and with other human beings. In his most acclaimed piece Videoplace, he places human embodiment in a position 'to constrain the referencelessness of digital code, thereby installing it as the agent whose action actualizes the (abstract) potential of code.' 

The paper will be focused on how the human motion can be used as a signal for the computer to produce output and how this process is transcribed in the computer screen through the use of the programming languages. Furthermore, I will try to explore the power of technologically mediated sensory engagement in the production of embodied being. Focusing on motion, I will try to tease out some of the complexities and the possibilities of sensory engagement, locating it in relation to the negotiation of embodied subjectivity and to the politics (individual, cultural, social) in which we are all, as embodied subjects, involved.

Locative Media and Augmented Reality. Bridges and Borders between Real and Virtual Spaces

The cultural panorama of last decades has been marked by an increasing development of digital technologies of information and communication, which are radically changing our models of sociability, production, learning or even our relation to space and time. In this area, authors like David Harvey, Manuel Castells or Paul Virilio, have spoken about the compression of space-time, acceleration, ubiquity or deterritorialization, especially in relation to the appearance of a virtual space of communication, the Cyberspace.

By means of the creative use of the same digital technologies, the artistic practices, not alien to this transformation, have turned into an important way of reflection and experimentation of these ICT effects into social practices and the collective imagery. Thus, in the specific case of space-time transformations, the artistic practices are using technology to explore the limits of these concepts and to generate experiences that give rise to new ways of understanding the borders between real and virtual spaces.

This communication intends to analyse these new relations of space-time through some of the latest artistic means that use digital technology, such as Locative Media and Augmented Reality. Locative Media are those artistic practices that use location systems such as Bluetooth, GPS or satellite to generate new participative cartographies. The Augmented Reality is a system that projects 3D information over physical reality. Both systems are able to add virtual information to the physical space in real time, generating what has been called 'Augmented Space' (Lev Monovich) or 'Informational Space'; (Andre Lemos).

So, the aim of this proposal is to study some particular examples of this kind of artistic practices, such as the PDPal Project, PacMahattan, Bio Mapping, or the works of the collective, The Einstein's Brain Project, among others, in order to show how they generate ubiquitous practices, not in two different physical spaces, but between the physical space and the virtual one.

Using the same examples, we will see how tracing a clear distinction between these two types of space becomes increasingly difficult. Unlike the Virtual Reality artistic practices, where the virtual space was overlapping and replacing the real one, here arises what we might call Hyperspace: a complex space that includes the physical one, the Cyberspace, the informational space and all the experiences, imaginaries and emotions related to them. Thus, artistic practices as a reflection tool will help us to define a new context of space-time experimentation that gives rise to new senses for notions, such as ubiquity, deterritorialization and telepresence. In other words, this phenomenological perspective based on the experience that the artistic practices make possible, will allow us to re-define these key concepts of the digital culture from a critical point of view.

Digital art: experimental and creative

Room 186
15.30

Stepping towards the immaterial: Digital technology revolutionizing art

More and more aspects of our lives nowadays are becoming „digitalized” and subsequently „immaterialized”: literature, music, art, things that used to have a physical presence and occupy space nowadays can fit into the few square millimetres of a hard disk or flow in the Internet. They can be multiplied intact, change place with one click, get converted through software or be forever erased without leaving a trace.

This communication seeks to analyze how digital technology has driven contemporary art towards Immateriality and how this immaterial art can be infinitely transformed by the artist and the public.
Bearing in mind Roland Barthes’ and George P. Landow’s analyses on literary theory as a counterpart, we will see how the flight into the immaterial has changed the traditional relationship among the artists and the public.

The quest for immateriality was one of the main interests of the artists during the second half of the 20th century; escaping the confines of matter and turning towards the world of Ideas – which Plato had cruelly ostracized them from – was a clear objective for the conceptual artists of the 1960s. For them, escaping matter meant denying form.

However, digital technology has allowed contemporary artists to savour the infinite space of the immaterial without negating image. Digital technology might imitate the form of reality, but in fact it is very different: behind the images, texts, videos that liven up in front of our eyes when looking at a screen, there is no light captured into film, no digits typed onto paper, but simply electrons -the slightest amount of matter, which cannot be perceived by the senses. A „digital” or „virtual” artwork doesn’t really exist; it’s just electrons on circuits, which – by means of multiple layers of sophisticated technology – get transformed into codes and subsequently into image onto our screen. When we turn off the screen, they return into nothingness – or their infinitesimal existence.

Theoretically, code is limitless; the only limits of the code is the imagination and the knowledge of the person that writes it. This is why more and more artists create the software necessary for their digital works. The „artist-programmer” is a figure that becomes increasingly common in the future, therefore we shall see some examples of this prototype.

On the other hand, the familiarization of a great part of the art public with digital technology has granted them with some of the rights of the artist: they can acquire a digital image or video, copy it or transform it with image and video editing software; sometimes the artist seeks their intervention - interactive art and Internet art calls for the participation of the public.

Following a phenomenological approach, we will see how this participation is experienced by the public, demonstrating our case with examples from contemporary art, such as the Internet Pavilion of the Venice Biennial, certain Virtual art spaces and Internet artworks.   
                                                                       

Creativity in surveillance environment: Jill Magid and the integrated circuit

This paper will look at the 2004 performance art piece ‘Evidence Locker’, and the accompanying text ‘One Cycle of Memory in the City of L’, by the American artist Jill Magid, in exploring the use of digital technology in contemporary art. Magid’s work looks at the world as governed by institutional systems, the binary roles of insider/outsider, and the languages of closed networks. In her own words, Magid explains: “to enter a system, I locate the loophole”. She has situated herself within various institutional matrices from the NYPD to the Dutch Secret Service, and her art subverts the expected roles and performances in order to enlighten her audiences to the inner workings of private and public networks. Her 2004 performance piece deals specifically with Citywatch, the surveillance branch of Merseyside Police and Liverpool City Council. Over the course of 31 days, Magid infiltrated their system, conducting interviews with employees in order to learn their procedures, deliberately making herself known to the city’s CCTV cameras, and following legal protocol to evade erasure from the video files and commit her recorded performance to the company’s evidence locker “forever” (e.g. in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998, video footage requested as evidence must be held on file for a minimum of seven years before destruction). The subsequent exhibitions included two installations in visual media, and a published text based on official access request forms sent to Citywatch during the month-long performance.

I intend to explore the social commentary offered by Magid’s ‘Evidence Locker’, informed by the critical approaches of Donna Haraway’s ‘integrated circuit’ theory, and Martin Heidegger’s quest for objective truth. Haraway, in her essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, speculates on the “informatics of domination” (1985:162), that is, the techno-social systems in place which subjugate, control, and segregate. Her “cyborg” is one who can transcend the boundaries enforced by society, moving fluidly through the systems, learning from them and gaining a deeper understanding of the human condition. Magid can be seen to assume the role of the cyborgian figure, using the digitised culture to her advantage, infiltrating the closed networks and moving through the matrix as a multi-lingual “reality pilot”. Alongside this analysis I will supplement my critique with the philosophical thought of Heidegger, in terms of his views on the acquisition of objective truth. In this respect, I will interpret Magid’s work from a Heideggerian perspective, exploring the ways in which the search for truth in the age of information is both assisted and hindered by the use of digital technology.

It is the aim of this paper to offer insight from the stance of art theory as to how digitalism is transforming, resituating, and reinscribing our cultural and social values. In a specific critique of Jill Magid’s performance piece, I intend to explore the use of digital technology as a medium which subverts prior conceptions of the subject/object dialectic, and blurs the line between the functional and the aesthetic.

New Media Culture Characteristics and Interface Metaphor. A Case Study on Brian De Palma's Digital Film, Redacted

Redacted is a digital film made by American filmmaker, Brian De Palma in 2007 and it won him a Best Director Silver Lion Award from that year's Venice International Film Festival. The film is based on the true Mahmudiyah killings in Iraq in 2006. It gets limited theatrical release in the USA and poor response from American audiences and comparatively larger worldwide gross. However, Redacted intensively indicates a new form of storytelling and expression with digital artistic facilities and metaphorically reveals the genuine and core characteristics of new media culture based on internet and web2.0 technology in digital era. It also demonstrates profoundly the vague relationship between culture producer/costumer and the complicated definition between the authorship/viewership.

The film's multi-device storytelling strategy is a typical metaphor of the new media culture producing and consuming to a certain extent. The docudrama shooting style, the consumer-camcorder captured images, even the MSN online talking sequence and surveillance CCTV videos cannot bring true effects to audiences, and all these stylishly digitized sequences would rather let audiences feel the story and events 'make-believable'. The feeling is just like when we cruise on internet, we do not care where the information sources come from, we do not care how many sources are reliable, we merely want to open as many interfaces as possible, and we do not care what kind of methods are employed while reading, viewing visual clips or listening to audios, playing with the sources, editing and forwarding, as long as we get the maximum information and fun and even reproduce it; but finally, we will not take all these experiences and all the information captured from the virtual reality very seriously, because we will not quite believe it is true or sometimes we make ourselves believe it is true, even though in our mind we actually know it is not true.

The film tells the story with multiple digital approaches to show the multiple aspects of truth, which is a visualized metaphor of us opening multiple interfaces from different sources on internet to know multiple dimensions of an event. However, after viewing the film, we still have a lot of questions to ask because of our doubts about the reality of the story: do the seemingly realistic devices show us the extent of reality, or just 'virtual reality'? Does this kind of 'virtual reality' take us further from the real world or closer to it? Do those classic traditional film theories and their related cinematic metaphors: Cine-Eye, Cine-drug, Cinema Magic, Window on the Window, Camera-Pen, Film Language, Film Mirror, and Film Semi-Dream, and so on, still function in new media devices or is there a need for a new one, not only for the new media producers but also for the new media receivers? Quite similarly, when we examine some news or events online, we pretty much ask ourselves easier questions, but subconsciously refer to and summarise the above questions.

This paper will analyze this phenomenal film, Redacted, and its theoretical metaphor for the creation and consumption of new media cultures, so that in the end the explicit traditional author/viewer relationship will be reviewed and redefined.

Audience Interaction in the Cinema: An Evolving Experience

Interaction arrived in the cinema as recently as the 1960s, yet has never caught on with the public in the way that other special formats such as IMAX seem to have done. Indeed, despite the panoply of varied technology available nowadays, it is almost non-existent. There are numerous clear reasons for this, some economical and technical, but there has certainly not been enough experimentation with the creative possibilities that this format offers both to creators and their audiences. At the same time, in more recent years the cinematic experience has expanded beyond the four walls of a traditional cinema, onto our mobile phones, the internet, the walls of nightclubs (so-called ‘live cinema’) and elsewhere.

Interactive artwork installations in public spaces started to become prevalent in the 1980s, although the majority of these are suited only to small numbers of simultaneous visitors, very often only for one viewer at a time. Usually the content of these installations is dramatically different from that which is available in the cinema. Nevertheless, by taking into account observations of user interaction in these situations, and combining it with a creative approach that does not attempt to replicate the traditional fiction film, this field of practice can usefully inform the interactive cinema experience.

This paper expands upon some of the author’s findings from over a decade of work in the creation and public display of interactive films, as well as research into the historical development of such films. Initially, the author’s interactive film artworks were created for gallery display using a touch-screen installation, and audience reaction was studied using a predominantly qualitative approach, for example by visually noting the minutiae of user activity and (where appropriate) recording video sequences of this. These observations fed into a body of work in which interactive films are designed for a live performance to audiences in a theatrical environment, presented either solo, or with a colleague in a touring show entitled ‘Cause and Effect’. Observations of audience interaction from these group screenings will also be presented in order to highlight techniques and scenarios that have proven to be successful.

Delay and non-materiality in tele-communication art

Raivo Kelomees

Prof., PhD

Estonian Academy of Arts

Does a work of art necessar­ily have to be represented by a final object? Can the communication between users/view­ers be a separate object of art? Can the us­er’s communication via various networks, in discourse with other people or programmed environments, be comparable to the situation where the user communicates with a work of art in a museum or gallery?

We could create an imaginary axis of re­ception divisions, based on delay, where there are works of art on the one side (whose ‘transmission’ to the receiver has lasted for millennia), and artworks sent and re­ceived in real time on the other side. Although this kind of formulation points to the vocabulary of infor­mation theory, art in this presentation has not been dealt with in this way, though this viewpoint has been considered.

I will deal shortly with the subject of me­dia archaeology, which has attempted to dis­cover the technologies that have been used to forward messages throughout millennia.

The prime assignment of a media archae­ologist is to explore motives and patterns, which travel through time so they can emerge once again. The second assignment is to try to find unknown connections or principal differences between the past and present. Many examples of earlier art and cultural practice are considered, where it is apparent in what way picture technology ‘delivered’ far-away art, gave the viewer the ability of ‘television’ and provided ‘participation’ in distant reality.

Here Lev Manovich’s discussions are relied upon. Manovich starts with ‘image-instruments’. The parts of a picture or image can, in present-day digital design, be programmed into but­tons; the picture becomes a control panel and an interface through which physical proc­esses in distant reality can be directed. A picture, even in its traditional meaning, is a means of transmission of actuality, a tele-transporter, a distant means of forwarding reality, through which it is possible to gov­ern it and to operate from a distance. The picture has always been used as an instru­ment of the power for mobilising and con­trolling resources.

The 1980s are important when it comes to formulating ideas and applications of tele-communicative art connected to technology. From that point forward, it was primarily technology that developed. Applications had al­ready been put into words, which were car­ried by phrases such as ‘Time and Space will constitute the ‘raw ma­terial for an ’artist of tomorrow; ‘as earlier marble, wood and metal were worked with, the current ‘immaterial­ity’ is worked with’; ‘the human being is increasingly moving towards the dematerialisation of his or her everyday experience’; ‘the contents of the exchange change from the mechanism of exchange itself’; ‘the specifi­city of communication art is about creating events instead of material objects’; ‘the crea­tion of a network of discrimination-free hu­man relations’; ‘telecommunication art de­picts itself as a culmination of the dematerialisation process of the object of art’ etc. All of this sets the coordinates of the attitude, which the developments of the 1990s rely on.