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Conversations

In a series of public interviews, recognized guests who participate in different roles in the production of new media arts will present the dilemmas and peculiarities of the field. Their opinions and ideas, past and present roles, tasks and perspective of various artistic contexts will provide significant input to the understanding of new media arts. The interviews are intended to extend beyond the two invited speakers to become a participatory conversation with the public, who can also pose questions about the guests’ current activities, creative process, successes, failures, concerns, inspirations and desires. Thus, these conversations are meant to be relaxed, informal, and spontaneous, yet informative, honest, vigorous, and constructive.

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Conversation / Education: Simge Esin (TR) with Seppo Gründler

(AT)
Wednesday, 2 June 2010, 19:00

The teaching of new media arts has been taken on by fine arts academies, however, as a rule, new media practices usually extend beyond the frame of visual arts expression and reach into the fields of robotics, computer science, biotechnology and other natural sciences. The role of educators and institutions demands an interdisciplinary approach: on the one hand, the optimization of research and production conditions, and on the other, the expansion of knowledge about theoretical starting points. The conversation will address such interdisciplinary approaches with

Simge Esin

, Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media Design Programme, Yildiz Technical University (YTU) in Istanbul. Her main areas of teaching are spatial communication design, scenography and design-driven innovation. Her research interests are interactive applications in physical space, and information technology-related spatial organizations of buildings and public spaces. Sound design and media artist

Seppo Gründler

will moderate the conversation and compare approaches using his experiences as the head of the MA programme in Media and Interactive Design at FH JOANNEUM and as professor of audio design at FHJ and guest lecturer at other universities.

 

Conversation / Theoretician: Marco Deseriis

(IT) with

Sunčica Ostoić

(HR)
Thursday, 3 June 2010, 19:00

Digital technology, telecommunications tools, and the democratization of technology have radically transformed the way in which we perceive the world around us. The existence of hypertexts, the thought processes which are built on network connectivity and interdisciplinarity, have sparked theoretical debates on the field of semantics, esthetics, and the effects of media information. The methods of interactivity and active inclusion of the public in artistic works have awaken a different understanding of the body, of space, and of time.

Marco Deseriis

, freelance journalist and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, is writing his dissertation, currently titled On Distributed Subjectivity: Collective Pseudonyms as Social Media, which traces a genealogy of collective and distributed naming strategies by bridging gaps between the history of the labor movement and the 20th-century avant-gardes. He co-wrote Net.Art: L’arte della Connessione (with Giuseppe Marano, Milan: Shake, 2003), which explores net.art both as an Internet-based art and an art of networking and has collaborated in culture jamming activist media interventions with the American group The Yes Men. Participating in the discussion with Deseriis will be

Sunčica Ostoić

, member of the Croatian curatorial collective Kontejner, which from 2003 has organized several new media arts festivals in Zagreb that include projects at the intersection of science, technology and arts, body art, and hybrid uses of media.

 

Conversation / Artist: Johannes Grenzfurthner

(AT) with

Vuk Ćosić

(SI)
Friday, 4 June 2010, 19:00

The multilayered contents and technical demands of new media artistic works have led a number of artists to create groups which join them in their passion for specific esthetic, technological, ideological, and ethical relationships and work processes. We will speak with Johannes Grenzfurthner from the art group

monochrom

about their attitude to socially subversive contents in artistic works and about the anti-cultural gestures of artists who use complex tools of communication and technology in their art. Of particular interest will be monochrom’s position towards support systems (curators, galleries, producers) and the question of the autonomy of new media artists and in what measure the use of high-tech in artistic works inevitably also contains a critical distance. Since 1993, the art-technology-philosophy group monochrom has had its seat in Vienna and, as they claim, Zeta Draconis. The group operates as an “unpeculiar” mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Joining the conversation will be

Vuk Ćosić

, one of the international pioneers of the net.art movement, who works extensively with ASCII code, low-tech esthetics and the archaeology of media.