About SNLab

SNLab develops projects with academia, public institutions and private industry in order to generate efficient networks that optimize interdisciplinary and creative approaches to innovation. New media, the intersections between fine arts, science and technology, regeneration projects, environmental and sustainability issues, secular society and virtual reality environments are some of the areas explored. SNLab works on the conception and development of creative content for exhibitions and media projects, collaborative synergies and the management of interdisciplinary networks.

Categories

Digital Culture
Technocultures
Art, Politics and Religion
Transculturalism
Post-humanity
Reconciliations
War Memories
Social Networking
Erosions
Queer Thoughts
News

Navigation

Home | SNLab |Ars Manifesta |.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Monthly Archives

September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009

Complete Archives
Category Archives

Feed

atom | rss

Subscribe

Search

Advanced Search

Join our Mailing List

BlogRoll

I am catching up with all the things that have happened during the semester. One of the most pleasant events was this conference in Carrara sponsored by La Scuola di Nuove Tecnologie dell’Arte dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, Il centro studi UCAN and Neural Magazine.

I had the possibility of discussing issues related to the preservation of digital media. It was a really good meeting and I hope to meet again both Tommaso Tozzi and Alessandro Ludovico. Check the magazine out (http://www.neural.it/).
 

I was in Glasgow for the Screen Studies Conference 2009 and its 50th anniversary. Had a blast of a time and of course met old friends and made new ones. (http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/screen/conference2009/) I chaired a really good session with two young academics; their names are Roya Rastegar who presented "New Frontiers off the Screen: Physical Cinema at the Sundance Film Festival" and Ariel Rogers with a paper titled "From Immersion to Connection: Digital Cinematic Experience in Light of Widescreen." The session titled AFTER CINEMA: Digital Screens was chaired by Aylish Wood. The panel was very well matched and my thanks go to Aylish Wood, Suzanne Buchan with "Theorizing Animation as the Manipulated Moving Image," and Dale Hudson with "Mobile Screens, Global Networks, Digital Structures and Politicizing ‘Film’". The title of my own paper and the abstract are below. UBIQUITOUS DIGITAL SCREENS: IMAGES ACROSS MEDIA FROM MOBILE PHONES TO GIANT SCREENS The paper will address issues of image reproducibility in new media and the de-evaluation of content re-presented across multiple screens. Is the continuous process of image reproducibility in new media and the de-evaluation of content re-presented across multiple screens producing more than a ‘witness/documentary’ society? Is the ubiquity of the image the cause underpinning a process of homogenization and commodification of content increasingly devoid of meaning, as Jean Baudrillard describes it? Are multiple screens altering forms of behavioral interactions, creating a metastructure able to enforce social homogenized behavioral responses? The desire to engage with multiple screens at any time and in any space does not necessarily reflect a deeper engagement either with content or with its mediated re-presentation across media. Remediation and transmediation, across multiple screens, provide the opportunity for a deeper participatory engagement although, as Paul Virilio states, these engagements can be characterized by instantaneity and ephemerality. Screens as multiple representations become nothing more than a tool to simulate an interactive experience that is void of meaning. The question raised by both Baudrillard and Virilio is if there is a value in contemporary images represented across multiple screens that provide the impression of an egalitarian democracy of participation. The paper will conclude by analyzing the opportunities and challenges that multiple screens offer for behavioral interactions when representing images that reduce social interactions to simulated reproductions of void. I was traveling between three conference in the past week and finally had some time to catch up with my blog and updates. I am in Istanbul now, 36 degrees celtius, and listening/watching CNN on TV while writing this post. My father always wondered how I could multitask - I have an unorthodox answer to that... Had a great time at the conference on the futurists although not too much time to spend with old and new friends. The conference details are available on: (http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/french/Futurism_conference.htm) DIGITAL AVANT-GARDE: PHYSICAL FREEDOM THROUGH TECHNOLOGY AS THE FUTURISTS’ CULTURAL INHERITANCE? The Futurists altered the perception of the relationship between the body and the machine. No longer competitive entities, the body and the machine are merging elements that converge in new structures. The borders of the Avant-garde are those of a new entity, neither human nor machine, that embodies the frontiers of contemporary digital art. The human body - by moving into new frameworks that allow the transpositions of the biological into the digital - has become a threshold to be superseded. Marinetti’s ideals and vision of a closer merging of the human and the machine is the basis upon which contemporary constructs of future visions, post-humanity, cyborgology, post-modernity, deconstructivism and human digitizations are shaped. The concept of embodiment, presence, digital transformations and representations of visual cues and behaviors in Virtual Reality Environments and Second Life offer to the artists and scientists alike new futuristic territories to conquer. The digital avant-garde is at work in order to transfer the emotions, the anima of the body, into the light speed of electricity, making mankind, or what is left of it, ubiquitous, omnipresent and forever young. The futurist’s debate on the role that art, science, technology, ethics, transformation of the body and transformation of the soul play in defining the concept of humanity and freedom has carried on from the 20th century into the 21st century. The digital conversion of biofeedback data in the visual representation of thoughts and dreams is one of the steps that is leading to the digital visualization of the brain’s processing mechanism. The mind - increasingly disjointed by the body in forms of digital visualizations that as in the Matrix trilogy by Andy and Larry Wachowski are not linked to a functional existence in real space - is its own newly empowered machine which, with the speed of light, creates new spaces of artistic and social engagements. The paper will conclude by arguing the role that futurism still plays in the contemporary digital avant-garde by shaping the artistic visions of a utopian and dystopian future where both the love and dread of the machine and of the digital coexist. The discussion on Yasmin (http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin/) about the Ethnic Cyborg has started. I am there as a respondent and this was my first emailed contribution to the list on July 1, 2009. I find the definition of 'ethnic cyborg' problematic. Reasons for my position are related to the basic nature of the cyborg, as envisaged by Donna Haraway. The new nature of the cyborg should have been that of revolutionizing the status quo, overcoming differences, surpassing and moving beyond human differences and even beyond human nature. The proposition of the cyborg as ethnically distinct has for me a very dangerous connotation, which is that of promoting a future power struggle based on augmented and non-augmented beings, racist interpretations of ethnicity (augmented-humans vs non-augmented-humans) and a constant quest for a bio-mechanical superiority. What I personally feel is that there is a generalized institutional attempt to conquer 'new' territories - the cyborg as well as that of the world wide web - and subjugate them by replicating old frameworks. This happens by imposing structures and divisions along the lines of already existing hierarchies in the realm of the real. The ethnic and consequentially national definition of the cyborg may just represent its ideological fall. In this context the cyborg, the Centaur of the futurists, has already failed in providing an alternative to the social hierarchies that according to Haraway should be altered and revolutionized. The cyborg is presenting us with an old framework just transferred and transposed in a different realm, that of the cybernetic organism.