:: Leonardo "Pacific Rim New Media Summit Companion"
:: FutureSonic: Urban Festival of Music and Electronic Arts

Leonardo Special Issue
Pacific Rim New Media Summit Companion
Volume 39 Number 4 2006
Guest Editor: Greg Niemeyer

Table of Contents and Abstracts

Editorial
Greg Niemeyer: Disentangling the Seams

Summit Introduction
Joel Slayton: The Pacific Rim New Media Summit

Welcome
Roger F. Malina: Network Theory: Art, Science and Technology in Cultural Context

Container Culture

Steve Dietz and Gunalan Nadarajan: Introduction
Container Culture is an exhibition developed by the Curatorial Working Group of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit. Each curator has selected one or more emerging regional artists to present at ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006, using a shipping container not only as its means of transportation but also as the "white cube" for the works’ exhibition. Curators: Zhang Ga, Ellen Pau, Gunalan Nadarajan, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Johan Pijnappel, Soh Yeong Roh, Deborah Lawler-Dormer.

Education

Rob van Kranenburg: HOWTO: the will to organize
The coming decade worldwide will be determined by the strained relationship between formal and informal structures and environments. A design for commoning, for living together locally in a globally connected world, is the new challenge. Bottom-up online and sensor-based innovation (wikipedia, commons-based peer production, thinglink) will create its own informal networks running parallel to top-down systems, such as nation states and the EU itself.

Roberto Verzola: Technology Issues and the New ICTs
The author provides examples of low-cost information and communications technologies (ICTs) and suggests five major strategies for their low-cost deployment in developing countries: (1) appropriate technology, (2) free/open software, (3) compulsory licensing, (4) pay-per-use public stations and (5) community/public ownership of ICT infrastructure. Aside from the problems of affordability and universal access, the author identifies the Internet's built-in biases for (1) English, (2) subsidizing globalization, (3) automation and (4) the technofix, and explores the implications of these biases. The challenge is not only to design affordable and accessible technologies or to redesign technologies to be consistent with our deeply held values, but also to make ourselves less technology dependent.

Marie Le Sourd: The Bandung Center for New Media Arts: Local Commitment and International Collaboration
Based on an interview between the author and Bandung Center co-founder Gustaff H. Iskandar, the article focuses on the Bandung Center for New Media Arts (BCNMA), an autonomous cultural space set up in 2001 by three Indonesian artists and architects. The BCNMA aims to encourage a dialogue with circles outside the art world and to offer greater dynamic possibilities for experimental forms of expressions. The Indonesian sociopolitical context after 1998 has had a great influence on the nature, development and methodologies used by this center. The case study of the Third Asia-Europe Art Camp, co-organized in 2005 by the BCNMA and the Asia-Europe Foundation, also highlights how international projects are developed by the BCNMA while taking into consideration the local cultural networks and creative environment.

Rob van Kranenburg: Notions of Policy in Eastern Asia--Europe Media Spaces
The author argues that we must not aim to define, alter or transform practices, processes, places or people, but rather to define a vision that inspires and empowers young people toward creativity in their concrete experience of agency in this seemingly undesignerly new ambient world.

Place, Ground and Practice

Danny Butt: Introduction: Local Knowledge: Place and New Media
“Local knowledge” denotes insider information such as, in the surfing world, under what conditions a particular surf break might be good, or how to surf a particular wave most effectively. While some local knowledge can be shared, a certain amount is tacit and experiential and cannot be codified. The author reflects on the incommensurability of indigenous and settler versions of knowledge of the land, and how these echo in the activities of indigenous new-media practitioners.

Rachel O'Reilly: Compasses, Meetings and Maps: Three Recent Media Works
The article explores possible cultural approaches to new-media art aesthetics and criticism through an in-depth appraisal of recent works by three contemporary practitioners from Asia and the Pacific: Lisa Reihana, Vernon Ah Kee and Qiu Zhijie. Particular attention is paid to the issues of place, location and cultural practice in their work, issues currently under-examined in new-media art discourse. The analysis pays close attention to the operationality of the works, the influence of pre-digital aesthetic histories and the richly locative and virtual schemas of indigenous epistemologies that serve to meaningfully expand Euro-American notions of locative media art.

Candice Hopkins: Making Things Our Own: The Indigenous Aesthetic in Digital Storytelling
This essay makes use of the characteristics of oral storytelling to define indigenous perspectives on narrative and to provide a framework in which to interpret video and new media art created by Zacharias Kunuk, Nation to Nation’s Cyberpowwow project and Paula Giese’s Native American Indian Resources.

Urbanity and Locative Media

Anthony Townsend: Locative-Media Artists in the Contested-Aware City
The adoption of mobile devices as the computers of the 21st century marks a shift away from the fixed terminals that dominated the first 50 years of computing. Associated with this shift will be a new emphasis on context-aware computing. This article examines design approaches to context-aware computing and argues that the evolution of this technology will be characterized by an interplay between top-down systems for command and control and bottom-up systems for collective action. This process will lead to the emergence of “contested-aware cities,” in which power struggles are waged in public spaces with the assistance of context-aware systems.

Drew Hemment: Locative Arts
The author discusses the field of locative arts, focusing on works and interests from 2003 to 2004. An overview is presented of the artistic project types found within this field, and the author considers in depth a number of issues such as how projects are shaped by their reliance on positioning technologies and the importance of the social within this area of practice.

Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis: Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things
Locative media has been attacked for being too eager to appeal to commercial interests as well as for its reliance on Cartesian mapping systems. If these critiques are well founded, however, they are also nostalgic, invoking a notion of art as autonomous from the circuits of mass communication technologies, which the authors argue no longer holds true. This essay begins with a survey of the development of locative media, how it has distanced itself from net art and how it has been critically received, before going on to address these critiques and ponder how the field might develop.

Latin America/Pacific-Asia New Media Initiatives

José-Carlos Mariátegui: Introduction: Pacific Rim New Media Development: A Search for Terra Incognita
Now that technology is reaching ubiquity, we see how each country has a different approach toward it. The author considers the question, Why create a Latin America/Pacific-Asia New Media Initiatives Group? and emphasizes that we cannot look solely toward the linear and rational world of technology to solve complex and non-linear social problems. Thinking in a non-linear way by considering examples of our micro-realities offers radical contrasts and hence unpredicted behaviors that will influence our notion of reality.

Ned Rossiter: Creative Industries in Beijing: Initial Thoughts
This article reports on current developments within “creative industries” in Beijing. The article discusses Dashanzi Art District and the Created in China Industrial Alliance in relation to such issues as labor, intellectual-property regimes, real-estate speculation, high-tech development zones, promotional cultures and the global variability of neoliberal capitalism. The article maintains that creative industries, as realizations of a policy concept undergoing international dissemination, are most accurately understood as cultural practices in trans-local settings that overlap with larger national and geopolitical forces.

Andrea Di Castro: Art and New Technology in Mexico: The National Center for the Arts
The author chronicles the history of Mexico’s Centro Nacional de las Artes (National Center for the Arts) in Mexico City, and in particular the Multimedia Center, a space dedicated to the creation and teaching of the arts and preservation of cultural heritage through the use of new technologies such as CD-ROMs, the Internet and teleconferencing, as well as exhibitions. After 10 years of operation, the Multimedia Center faces new types of challenges as the new technologies become successfully integrated into creative practice. In response to the changing environment, the center is moving toward collaborations with similar institutions internationally and toward new funding models.

Geetha Narayanan: Crafting Change: Envisioning New-Media Arts as Critical Pedagogy
As India enters the sixth year of the new millennium, there seems to be ample evidence to validate the claim that it is new technologies and their infrastructures that have supported and enabled its current economic revolution. This revolution promises a new society based on knowledge and information. This emphasis poses tremendous challenges to educators and forces them to question the fundamental tenets on which they would develop pedagogies and create learning that is both sustainable and critical. The author argues that the process of creating new media art can in itself be construed as critical pedagogic practice and that new-media artists have a role to play as public intellectuals.

Piracy and the Pacific

Steve Cisler: Pirates of the Pacific Rim
The term piracy once referred simply to crimes at sea but now also refers to widespread crimes by which intellectual property is copied and sold or given away through electronic networks and in kiosks, shops and flea markets. Countries such as the U.S.A., whose origins were based on technology piracy, are now the most protective. Companies that were once sued for infringement are now suing others. Piracy is cited as a source of income for criminal and extreme political groups. Cultural appropriation of traditional herbs, songs and art is not easily combated. Fake drugs and airline parts create safety issues that are not encountered with pirated books or DVDs. Some scholars and legal experts have called for abandoning copyright or have proposed alternative schemes for intellectual property.

The Invisible Dynamics of the Pacific Rim and the Bay Area
Peter Richards, Susan Schwartzenberg and Jeannette Redensek: Introduction: Common Systems: The Invisible Dynamics of the Pacific Rim and the Bay Area

Invisible Dynamics is an interdisciplinary project that invites art/science research teams to explore the systems and behaviors, both urban and natural, that give the San Francisco Bay Area its definitive character. The project engages the domains of art, design, cultural geography, cartography, information design, sociology, archaeology, hydrology, ecology, marine sciences and history. The authors posit that it is instructive to look at and try to understand some of the dynamics of the Bay region as a step toward understanding the complexities of the systems that define the Pacific Rim.

Annie Lambla: The Exploratorium’s Invisible Dynamics Project: Environmental Research as Artistic Process
The Invisible Dynamics project is based at the Exploratorium in San Francisco; it seeks to manifest the inevitable and reciprocal relationship between art and science that is at the heart of the museum's mission. An attempt to visualize invisible, often cartographic, systems in the San Francisco Bay Area, it places various elements of Bay Area life in a context that can then proportionally be used to relate San Francisco to the greater Pacific Rim in a similar scalar relationship. The following study is based on ethnographic research with participants in this multidisciplinary project. The paper analyzes one part in particular of the Invisible Dynamics project---Hidden Ecologies, a photographic, cartographic collaboration between a microbiologist and an architect. The subjective and consistently similar ideas of the flexibility between artistic and scientific processes are expressed by those involved in Hidden Ecologies as well as the "artists" of the other three projects that make up Invisible Dynamics.

Leonardo Network News

FUTURESONIC 2006
Urban Festival of Electronic Music and Arts
Manchester 20 - 23 July

Futuresonic celebrates its 10th anniversary with a festival programme of over 100 acts and artists from around the world. Featuring an international conference, ground breaking exhibitions and over 30 events, Futuresonic 2006 has it all.

No mud, no tents. Just 3 glorious days of sounds and sights at venues across the city.

Futuresonic Live http://10.futuresonic.com/futuresonic_live.html
Off The Map http://10.futuresonic.com/off_the_map.html
Instrument http://10.futuresonic.com/instrument.html

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES SUMMIT
THE FUTURESONIC 2006 CONFERENCE
MANCHESTER UK
20-23 JULY 2006
http://10.futuresonic.com/social_technologies_summit.html

Opening event Thursday 20th July, 4.30pm
Conference Friday 21st & Saturday 22nd July, 10am-5pm
Delegate Pass 45 GBP
http://10.futuresonic.com/tickets.html

Futuresonic 2006, Manchester’s urban festival of electronic music and arts, celebrates its 10th anniversary with the launch of a major new conference strand, the Social Technologies Summit, bringing together leading figures to explore “a whole new way of doing things in the air”.

SUMMIT PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE:

Masaki Fujihata, last.fm, Regine Debatty (www.we-make-money-not-art.com), Steve Coast (openstreetmap.org), Share NYC (http://share.dj/share/), Toshio Iwai (Electroplankton on the Nintendo DS), Matt Webb, Richard Peckham (Galileo/Astrium), Inke Arns, Stephen Kovats, Tom Carden, Atau Tanaka, Jose Luis de Vicente, Stanislav Roudavski, Steve Benford, Rob Van Kranenburg, James Wallbank, Ben Russell, Drew Hemment.

Plus talks and presentations by festival artists including…

Zachary Lieberman, Simon Pope, Michelle Teran, Jen Southern, Pete Gomes, Open Music Archive, Owl Project, Pete Hindle, Sven Koenig, Victor Gama, mimoSa, Bandung Center for New Media Arts, and many more.

-Read thru for details on summit strands. workshops, venue and tickets!