Archive for December, 2009
Call to Participate!
Dear friends,
This Friday, December 11 at 6pm PST I will premiere my latest dance-tech piece, “Fragment 3.” I am writing to invite you all to participate in my performance by uploading material of your own to CiTu’s “The Art Collider (TAC),” which is an interactive networking system that I will use throughout my performance.
Please find instructions for easy ways to connect via Connect and Participate site. I would recommend “Live Camera” if you want to input live video, or “Flowmixer” to input prerecorded and/or mixed material. Then, you can simultaneously connect to other footage from the system by opening up links from other live projects. TAC is a fairly new project that is still in the final development stages, but the system seems to be working quite well. I will project a sampling of any material in the network throughout my performance.
Please find a description of my project below and I look forward to seeing you on the network!
“Fragment 3″ is the third fragment in a process-based series that choreographer Ashley Ferro-Murray has been working on since Fall 2008.
Exploring the space between digital spectrality and digital saturation, this piece moves through various networks as it leads an audience through various iterations of digital choreographies. Wireless accelerometers used throughout the choreographic process inspire the conceptual context of this piece. These sensors are deleted are not worn in performance to explore the body in movement as it exhibits a digital tone in the absence of digital technology. In contrast to the spectral presence of the sensors, the performance space itself is saturated with digital interface. A live video feed of the real-time performance will be input into French digital installation artist Maurice Benayoun’s online network for artistic collaboration, The Art Collider (TAC). Simultaneously, Ferro-Murray projects real-time images from other artists using TAC.
In association with BCNM (Berkeley Center for New Media).
All the best,
Ashley
Signing out.
Ken Goldberg is now wrapping up before we go and eat!
Great day of musings, theories, studies, ideas for the future, reports on designs etc. etc. etc.
TONIGHT: 7:30-9:00 pm: UC Regents’ Lecture by Jimmy Wales (in 105 Stanley)
Using games to confront real world problems
Jane McGonigal provides an amazing and seemingly unintentional response to Hubert Dreyfus’ earlier remarks.
McGonigal explains how the average young person who is a gamer will spend 10,000 playing games by the time they reach the age of 21. This is also the same amount of hours that they will spend in secondary school. Incidentally, in Outliers Gladwell argues that 10,000 hours is the amount of time to spend on something in order to get mastery.
So, McGonigal asks, rather than working on fictional problems on games, what if we could harness the collective 3 billion hours spent gaming a week on real-world problems. Jamais Cascio with Institute for the Future has a phrase: Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals. With Cascio, McGonigal works at the Institute for the Future to build games that deal with real world problems such as the world without oil.
For Jane’s slides visit: slides@avantgame.com
Epic Win
Jane McGonigal, Director of Game Research & Development at Institute for the Future and graduate of my program is about to speak at the Future of the Forum!
Social Media and Art
Marc Davis, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of Invention Arts looks at how digital networks make the invisible visible and the impermanent permanent as we know when peoples whereabouts overlap with devices like an iPhone, for example.
How does this relate to artists such as William Kentridge who look to make the invisible visible in art projects such as Parcours D’atelier: Artist in the Studio? Kentridge uses art products to make the invisible visible. How, then, does his product relate to those social networking processes that we’ve been exploring all day?
Also, as Davis uses game theory to understand the scale of social interaction with his projects that work with geo-tagged photographs etc, I wonder how we can use performance theory as it relates to game theory to understand connections between social media and art pieces that engage similar concepts.
Google Wave
Lars Rasmussen, co-developer of Google Wave explains the program as he skypes in from Australia. They have constructed the protocol as an open protocol so that using wave doesn’t mean that you’re committed to Google data centers. I think the open-source nature of this technology is telling and important. This is one thing that we haven’t talked about too much today, but that seems incredibly important in the larger discussion about the future of the forum.
Oops! We lost him on skype…
Some thoughts…
…from the current panel.
- Anonymity might not be possible on the Internet, while we still need to manage how we craft our profiles and present them online. In relation to this morning’s discussion on identity, Wales said “anonymity is not a threat to Wikipedia.” How would these panelists respond to this topic?Dick Costolo predicts less anonymity in future forums, which he explains can be a good thing because it requires more responsibility. However, he acknowledges that in the situation of an authoritarian government it becomes easier to identify who said what.
- Advertising needs to be re-thought, or even re-invented. Laura Sydell references ethical issues regarding the Internet and advertising.
- Social meeting as working from the bottom up. Seth Goldstein argues that you have control of your action, but you don’t have control of the information your actions produce. So maybe there wont be a bottom up revolution.
- Conversation about professional artists in relation to online activity. Does art have to be online??? Or at least connected to online sources?
- How can the panelists give back to those who do not have access to the technologies that they develop? Or work with?
- What has social media done during the recession? The correlation seems fairly unclear.
- Question from the audience: “How is video going to rock this world?” It could insure the open furtur of media as it is a way to fact check and to present various positions looking at the same thing. This could relate to Ieva Jusionyte’s point earlier. In this thread, Sydell argues that if a news organization is going to survive it will actually need to rely increasingly on credibility.
Google-jockey
Thinking about aesthetic models, Greg Nieymeyer is playing google jockey for the current panel.
3:00-4:30 pm: ROUNDTABLE: The Future of the Forum
Moderator: Professor Shannon Jackson, TDPS, UC Berkeley
Dick Costolo, COO, Twitter
Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder and CEO, SocialMedia
Reid Hoffman, Founder, LinkedIn
Laura Sydell, Journalist, National Public radio
Check it out live: http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/fotf/live.html
Education and online participation
David Malinowski and Viola Lasmana
Writing in the classroom can be disengaged from the wider public, how can we relate it to social engagement? Lasmana is thinking about students as subjects who need to engage in multiple discourses that allow them to situate themselves across dialogues in their communities and with the general public at large. Students need to renegotiate their role in the public sphere.
From focus on student Malinowski looks at a focus on the institution, they pose the question: how much does an institution restrict the student’s ability to represent him or herself online.
Participation as performance as people represent versions of themselves. What is representation and how is it modulated to representations of power?
Is it possible that there is also a still price in using media in institutional settings because of a much older power of hierarchies that presents itself through us?
