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.

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 public 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.

Digital art: experimental and creative

Room 243
16.30

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.                                                                                      

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.
               
                                        

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.

Is digital enhancing cultural experience?

Room 186
16.30

Between Technology and Teleology: Can Digital Age Embrace Analog Experience of Culture?

Cultures stand at a critical junction in history. Modern society confronts the burden of gifts and curses of digital technology where the lines between real relations and virtual relations become blurred, and interconnections between cultural objects and their respective signs become trivialized. Digital technology affects our entire cultural practices exemplified in global exchanges of information, freedom of expression, and the unprecedented sphere of choices. Although digitization is an advantageous technological achievement of speed and accuracy, it impoverishes the role of the analog mode in experiencing the undifferentiated cultural reality. The real world seems to be replaced by images that make themselves the epitome of reality, where technology is viewed as a factitious god, making its own rules and aims at nothing but itself. The mass rush to digitization comes with an imaginative result, but with a high price. Although the nature of life favors optimization over maximization, effectiveness rather than efficiency, digitization continues to be our path to efficient maximization. And because of our habit of comfort, it is impossible for our technologically advanced society to resurrect the good old days. The debate among proponents and opponents of digital technology and its roles in the transformation of culture seems to lead to confusion and frustration. Several questions are raised to organize this debate and to seek more sensibility and understanding: In what way does digital age endanger cultural reality? How can the information age help to preserve the identity of cultures in our ever-changing and homogenizing digital world? How do we capitalize on the power of virtual reality to maintain cultural memory? What fundamentally different ways of thinking and interacting with digital information enable us to transform and sustain cultures? What roles does digital communication play in moving beyond the pseudo-social life to authentic cultural practices?

This paper introduces a different theoretical framework by juxtaposing the competing yet mutually reinforcing role of technology and the idea of teleology. The theoretical framework draws from philosophy (e.g. Jean Baudrillard, Jean Gebser), semiotics (e.g. Charles S. Peirce, Yuri M. Lotman) and contemporary systems thinking (e.g. Ervin Laszlo, Humberto Maturana); and is substantiated by historical events and traditional cultural practices. Based on this framework, and by reframing the challenge at hand, the paper calls for a design approach, engaging producers and users in a co-creating process that seeks a purposeful integration of humans and machines, and leads to new forms of cultural semiosphere.

A conclusion is reached calling for an eco-humanistic understanding of cultural transformation, and suggests that: 1) digital technology is best viewed as a means to an end, where the means and the end reciprocate purposefully in an integrative circularity; and 2) persevering and feeling comfortable with the paradoxical and tensional relationship between techne and teleos can bring forward a sustainable and desirable future that transcend virtual reality into an authentic and enhanced cultural reality. This is what our digital age needs for cultural transformation.

Designing Knowledge and Memory   

Design has it hard these days. In the division of labour, it is still not quite placed in front because its mission is often just to visualize. Thinking is done by others, or so it seems. Bringing out form and visibility, turns out to be not that easy. The process of designing and shaping proves to be highly complex since designers are determined to develop innovative drafts out of a con¬text of numerous and often contradictory premises.

Designers face this complexity the following way:  They approach the nature of the task (problem) by designing and the collecting of solutions. At the same time, designers tend to balance their interpretation of the problem with their own solutions. 'The development of the problem and its solution go hand-in-hand', is how design theorist Nigel Cross describes this connection, which he calls the 'problem setting'. Alternately, the designer defines the fo¬cus of his work and its context.

This process has consequences. Designing and shaping change cultural memory. In the course of its interpretive and shaping way of operating, design constantly adds (Setzung) to the culture programme. According to Cross, designers not just design shapes or visual interpretations in the context of cultural prerequisite connections (Voraussetzung); they also continually develop new perspectives of cultural conditions. Thereupon, designers are partly responsible for a process that can be named cultural metabolism, which means the active change of cultural memory.

Therefore, design affects cultural-scientific research in two ways: On the one hand, it marks the functional part of culture, which appears to be partly responsible for the establishment of formal-aesthetic links and which has hardly been grasped scientifically in its unity. On the other hand, it has an eminent influence on the cultural memory which has rarely been paid attention to in a scientific way in connection with the designing process.

Up to now being forced to decide between the exegesis of design-developed artefacts and the reflection of the process of designing, design research is increasingly challenged to grasp designing processes in their cultural dependencies. Referring to cultural prerequisite connections, the design-creating process links the appearance of cultural artefacts with the memory of the culture. With their work, designers not just transport the knowledge of culture and society. Following their designing ethics intrinsically, they change the cultural prerequisite connections and, by means of ever new sets, act as agents of culture.

INTERMODULACTIVARITY, The shape of the book to come

As a medium, the book in paper has long been the most significant information vehicle. In the present society, which to a large extent is dominated by other, digital media, the book has lost a great deal of its status.

On the one hand, this is due to the ever increasing digitalization of information, but on the other hand also because of the way we - readers - handle information differently. The new(er) media and electronic text that dominate large portions of our daily life, have led us to handle information in a non-linear manner. By ourselves, we copy-paste, "sample" and determine when to consult which specific information. The role of the user himself becomes increasingly important, he/she wants to interact with, and to a certain extent aid in the creation of, the information he/she reads or processes. He/she is therefore not merely a producer or a consumer, but a prosumer, an identity in which terms such as modularity and interactivity are essential.

Since its creation, the book has undergone few fundamental changes in form. The recent history of the 'artist book' reveals structurally interesting results, however those are usually limited to one-off versions in which production had not or only partially been taken into account. Although the book today still has unique characteristics which are untranslatable to the modern digital media, for several reasons the book in paper no longer fulfils a modern user's needs. Every adaptation in form the book has undergone, from papyrus role to the current codex form, presented a specific solution to a problem which presented itself at the time.

This lecture discusses that evolution, which shows that the language and the processing of information in the new media can be translated to the existing physical structure of the book, as a tangible object as well as an information vehicle. Because of the continuously increasing data flow, the present dynamic and multi-layered digital graphic language, that finds its origins in the 1980s, is forced to assume a more structured and functional form. Based on recent editions I attempt to demonstrate that the dynamic action-oriented handling of new media can be translated into book design too. Using a variety of kinds and sizes of paper, different reading directions, book is capable of obtaining a descriptive as well as a performative function. The book's spread and the underlying layers provide a framework which, much as do displays, offers the possibility to design new navigational methods and structures. This new approach to production processes and basic techniques allows designers to restructure the book both visually and tangibly, allowing readers to be able to use a more interactive, modular and therefore dynamic book-object.




It has repeatedly been stated that it is difficult to get an overview of the Baltic diaspora’s cultural heritage, as the archival collections and the information relating to them are so scattered.  At the end of World War II, 200,000 nationals of the three Baltic countries (including 70,000–90,000 Estonians) fled the Soviet occupation and left their homelands. When earlier emigration is taken into account, it is clear that all three Baltic countries have notable diasporic communities. Their decades-long cultural engagement has produced voluminous collections of archival records.
 
The historic shift in the late 1980s and early 1990s was accompanied by a technological one. At the same time as the Baltic states regained their independency, the world was going digital. The Internet with all its possibilities of virtual communication and networking has helped revive scattered communities around the globe. People’s thinking regarding where and how the cultural heritage of the Baltic diaspora should be preserved and made accessible has also changed. The general mindset in the Baltic states’ memory institutions around the turn of the millennium was one where the archive materials of the diaspora communities should be brought back to the historic homelands of the peoples in question. Today, it is regarded obvious that archive materials also can be held in the countries where the Baltic diasporic communities settled, provided that there are guarantees for their proper preservation and accessibility. The standpoint that (the Baltic diaspora’s) archival information ought to be widely accessible is not only influenced by the political process of democratisation, but also by the expectations that have arisen within the public due to the new technological possibilities at hand.
The multilingual electronic gateway www.balther.net was launched in 2007 to gather information on the archival collections and cultural heritage of the Baltic diaspora. The aim is to secure access to these materials, to value the cultural legacy of the Baltic diaspora and to promote the study and preservation of this heritage. The portal contains advice and instructions on organizing and preserving cultural heritage; information on the memory institutions engaged in the collection, preservation, and research of the cultural heritage of the Baltic diaspora; databases, portals, electronic publications, bibliographies, electronic exhibitions; news on events, grants, trainings, job offers, events; gallery, news archives and a forum.

The presentation will focus on the following themes relating to the development of the portal:

• making archival information and collections available – is it only a matter of technology?
• the expectations and contributions of the use;
• the challenge of networking (state institutions, NGOs, professionals and specialists, community members and their different generations, over 10 countries involved).