[eccr] Digital Media and Digital Culture Seminar Series

>Digital Media and Digital Culture Seminar Series
>Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster
>Coleraine Campus, Northern Ireland
>
>This seminar series is international in scope and collaborative in
>intention.  Leading researchers in the field of digital media and
>digital culture are invited to submit proposals to participate in the
>program.  Along with the presentation of papers, participants will
>also have the opportunity to run workshops with students and staff
>that explore database programming & aesthetics, network
>collaborations, new media education, project management, sustainable
>funding possibilities, open source movements and organised networks,
>to name a few of the interests that have arisen so far.
>
>Along with live webcasting and documentation on the Centre's website
>(under construction), it is anticipated that all papers presented in
>the seminar series will be published in a working paper series
>currently being planned by Fibreculture Publications
>(http://www.fibreculture.org). This working paper series will be
>published annually, and it will comprise an international digital
>media and digital culture research seminar.  In other words, the
>papers from the Centre for Media Research seminar will have an
>after-life in a larger, international and trans-institutional
>discussion on key issues in the field.  It is hoped the working paper
>series will lead to future collaborations between individuals and
>institutions.
>
>All are very welcome to attend any of the presentations, including
>the external review on the 6 July, 2004.
>
>For futher information, expressions of interest and inquiries, please contact:
>
>Ned Rossiter
>Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media)
>Centre for Media Research
>University of Ulster
>Cromore Road
>Coleraine
>Northern Ireland
>BT52 1SA
>
>email: (n.rossiter /at/ ulster.ac.uk)
>tel.+44 (0)28 7032 3275
>
>
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>
>Monday 5 July, 2004
>3-4 pm, Venue: L116, South Building
>
>Dr Esther Milne <(EMilne /at/ groupwise.swin.edu.au)>
>Media & Communications, Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia
>
>Abstract
>
>"That Curious Double Feeling: Fantasies of Presence in Email and
>Epistolary Practice"
>
>In its representational systems and iconography and in the conceptual
>framework currently deployed to understand it, email communication is
>clearly indebted to epistolary culture.  Email's dominant metaphor is
>the post. However, the relation between email and the paper-based
>postal system has not been adequately explored.  In response, this
>paper reveals certain continuities between the two systems, arguing
>that a fantasy of presence pervades the socio-technological
>representations of email and epistolary practice.  How do
>geographically dispersed agents make themselves seem "present" to
>each other?  While corresponding by letter, postcard or email,
>readers construe an imaginary, incorporeal body for their
>correspondents that, in turn, reworks their interlocutor's
>self-presentation.  The fantasy of presence reveals a key paradox of
>cultural communication, namely that material signifiers can be used
>to produce the experience of incorporeal presence.  In order to map
>this fantasy historically, tropes of presence and intimacy are traced
>through three media sites: a "virtual community" of
>nineteenth-century letter writers, the postcard correspondence of
>First World War soldiers and a twenty-first century email discussion
>list.
>
>Bio
>
>Esther Milne has recently completed her Doctorate at the University
>of Melbourne. Her thesis, "Fantasies of Presence: Letters, Postcards,
>Email", examines a range of material practices, technological
>modalities and cultural formations, to show the interrelation between
>fantasies of presence and concepts of intimacy and disembodiment.
>She lectures in media & communications at Swinburne University with a
>particular focus on new media history and the technological
>imaginary. <http://www.swin.edu.au/sbs/>.  She is also one of the
>facilitators for Fibreculture, the Australasian network for internet
>research and critical theory <http://www.fibreculture.org> and one of
>the Editors for Fibreculture Journal, http://journal.fibreculture.org
>
>
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>
>Monday 5 July, 2004
>4.15-5.15pm, Venue: L116, South Building
>
>[followed by drinks]
>
>Danny Butt <(danny /at/ dannybutt.net)>
>School of Design, Unitec New Zealand
>
>Abstract
>
>"Market Cultures/Culture Markets: Perspectives on Inequality in the
>Creative Economy"
>
>Diverse academic disciplines are beginning to develop specific roles
>for information in the economy. Information economics highlights
>distinctive properties for information, services, and other
>immaterial goods. Economic and cultural sociology has demonstrated
>the socially and culturally embedded nature of markets. In
>Marxist-inflected Cultural Studies there has been a long debate about
>the relationship  between the cultural/ideological "superstructure"
>and the economic base. New Media studies has shown the limitations of
>a "Digital Divide" based on physical and financial resources,
>emphasising the importance of social and cultural factors in IT use.
>This paper argues that we can productively synthesise aspects of this
>work to theorise socio-economic inequality in the emerging
>informational environments. Such a perspective requires attention to
>the perspectives of those excluded from highly informational markets,
>and attention to the cultural basis of our understanding of "the
>economy".
>
>
>Bio
>
>Danny Butt lectures in Theory at Unitec School of Design, and former
>Director of the Creative Industries Research Centre at Waikato
>Institute of Technology. He also runs #place, a dialogue on location,
>cultural politics, and social technologies. Danny is a facilitator
>for Fibreculture, Australasia's peak network for Internet research
>and theory; a member of ORBICOM - the UNESCO Chairs in
>Communications; and New Zealand representative on the Panel of
>Authors for ORBICOM/UNDP's Digital Review of Asia Pacific. Before
>entering the academic field his professional career spanned the
>music, publishing, new media, contemporary arts, and advertising
>industries.
>
>http://www.dannybutt.net, http://www.place.net.nz,
>http://fibreculture.org
>
>
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>
>Tuesday 6 July, 2004
>Venue: L116, South Building
>
>External review of the research program in Digital Media & Digital Culture
>
>11am - Introduction of the presentation and its purpose
>11.15 Dan Fleming
>11.35 Daniel Jewesbury
>11.55 Paul Moore
>12.15 Ned Rossiter
>
>short break
>
>12.40-1.40 Respondents: Danny Butt and Esther Milne
>
>
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>
>Tuesday 25 August, 2004
>11am-12pm, Venue: TBA
>
>Dr Chris Chesher <(c.chesher /at/ unsw.edu.au)>
>School of Media and Communications, University of New South Wales, Australia
>http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/
>
>Abstract
>
>"Invocation, Evocation and Avocation in New Media Art"
>
>New media art distracts and summons its users, calls up events based
>on their actions, and brings up specific sensations and affects: it
>works with avocations, invocations and evocations. As a domain for
>experimentation that adapts available technologies to aesthetic ends,
>new media art defamiliarises standard artefacts to reveal the modes
>of interaction and expression characteristic of all computers (or
>invocational media).
>
>Using work by Luc Courchesne, Char Davies and Gary Hill, this paper
>explores how different works mobilise these three primitive
>technocultural formations. It draws on Deleuze's concept of the
>movement image as a "genetic element" in cinema to identify the
>invocation as a genetic element in computer-based media.
>
>Avocations generate users' awareness and desire to perform
>invocations. Avocations predetermine the semantic and syntactic
>limits of possible invocations through material interfaces and
>software coding. Once users are attracted, they are granted a
>capacity to invoke. Evocations manifest invocations as sensations,
>tuned to produce affective reactions in users that may feed back as
>avocations towards further invocations: the cybernetic refrain
>characteristic of invocational media.
>
>Bio
>
>Dr Chris Chesher is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and
>Communications at the University of New South Wales with an unhealthy
>obsession with new media. He wrote his PhD at Macquarie University on
>what makes computer-based media distinctive, arguing that they are
>characterised by their capacity to call up things, and should be
>reconceptualised as "invocational media". He established, and now
>coordinates the MA (New Media) program at UNSW, which introduces new
>media practitioners to contemporary cultural theory. He has been at
>UNSW since 1997, the first year of the BA (Media and Communications),
>a program with a strong emphasis on new media theory and practice.
>Before this he taught at Macquarie, UTS and Newcastle.
>
>As one of the facilitators of the critical Internet studies mailing
>list Fibreculture, he organised the "Networks of Excellence"
>conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in November
>2002. He recently co-edited a special edition of Media International
>Australia on computer games and media studies methodologies. His
>writing can be found online in Cultronix, Ctheory and CultureMachine,
>in hard copy in several books, and in journals including Convergence
>and Media International Australia.
>
>
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>
>Tuesday 12 October, 2004
>1-2pm, Venue: TBA
>
>Dr. Daniel Jewesbury <(d.jewesbury /at/ ulster.ac.uk)>
>Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster
>
>Abstract
>
>"The Affects of Reality: Dialectical Aesthetics and Digital Media"
>
>(i)
>Question: Can art make a fairer, more just society?
>The question, often voiced, betrays an angst on the part of the
>questioner: why *doesn't* art appear to have the capacity to bring
>about real social transformation? What should I, as an artist, be
>doing to address this? *How can I make myself feel less guilty about
>my art?*
>
>Talk about "the social role of art" is necessarily positioned
>somewhere between two poles: one dictating that art must be capable
>of effecting direct social change or have clear social use, the other
>arguing that it must "transcend" the merely material. Neither
>position is viable. If one cannot justify art *in its own terms*, one
>falls back on instrumentalisms (couched in terms of dimly-defined
>"communities" or "publics") in order to find a worth presumed not to
>be immanent in the work itself. Instrumentalised approaches to art
>lead to patronising, paternalistic assumptions about its
>"benevolence", and produce an "art" devoid of any aesthetic merit
>whatsoever (however that is accounted for).
>
>(ii)
>This paper gives an account of the "dialectical aesthetic", through
>which it argues a case for art as a *non-instrumental* "good".
>Appropriating the late work of György Lukács (only available, in
>English, through secondary sources), and combining it with other more
>recent contributions, I theorise an *ethical aesthetic*, in which
>form, content and context inflect and inform one another, a critical
>realism beyond mere naturalism, with which to *re-envisage* (rather
>than merely represent) the world, and through which to develop
>"consciousness" of the contradictory conditions of that world.
>
>The paper then asks whether the theorisation of a distinctive
>"digital aesthetics" is desirable, or even tenable. By introducing
>certain formal characteristics and social contexts of digital media
>(hypertext and hyperlinks, globalisation, and so on) into the
>dialectical aesthetic, it is demonstrated that the "new" media can
>never be adequately theorised in "novel" technology-centered
>conceptualisations.
>
>
>Bio
>
>Dr Daniel Jewesbury is an artist and writer based in Belfast, and a
>Research Associate in Digital Cultures at the Centre for Media
>Research, University of Ulster. He completed his PhD at the Media
>Studies department of the University of Ulster in 2001, writing on
>potential theoretical relations between hybridity and non-linear
>narrative media. It was the first piece of part-practical research
>undertaken in the department, with practical outcomes comprising a
>website and digital video installation based around the dislocated
>site of London Bridge, in Arizona.
>
>Exhibitions include Manifesta3, Ljubljana (2000), Urban Control, Graz
>(2001) and various others across Europe and North America. He won the
>Victor Treacy Award at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, in 2001. Recent
>public art projects include Exchange (2003), a radio station and
>short film produced with a diverse group of immigrants in Carlow,
>Ireland (including asylum-seekers, refugees and migrant workers). One
>to Ten (2002) was produced in collaboration with the Transport &
>General Workers' Union, Flax Art Studios and the Routes Public Art
>Project; it used interviews with bus workers and videos of bus
>journeys around Belfast to explore the rapidly changing character of
>the city as it undergoes redevelopment and regeneration. The work was
>presented in cinemas across the city. He is currently engaged on two
>major projects: Lisburn Road Archive, a photographic documentation of
>the middle-class in a Belfast suburb commissioned by Belfast Exposed
>Photography (in collaboration with Ursula Burke); and Bhowani
>Junction, a major film installation project (in collaboration with
>sound artist Paul Moore).  The first part of the Bhowani project, the
>artist's book Of Lives Between Lines, is published by Book Works.
>Jewesbury is a co-director of Cinilingus, an independent
>film-screening organisation in Belfast, and co-editor of Variant
>magazine (http://www.variant.org.uk).
>
>
>|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
>
>Tuesday 19 October, 2004
>1pm-2pm Venue: TBA
>
>Ned Rossiter <(n.rossiter /at/ ulster.ac.uk)>
>Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster
>
>Abstract
>
>"WSIS vs. Organised Networks: Information, Democracy and the Problem
>of Institutional Scale"
>
>This paper assesses the recent World Summit on the Information
>Society (WSIS) held in Geneva last December. With disputes amongst
>various representatives over issues such as domain names, root
>servers, IP addresses, spectrum allocation, software licensing and
>intellectual property rights, the summit demonstrated that the
>architecture of information is a hugely contested area. As evidenced
>in official WSIS documents, consensus between governments, civil
>society groups, NGOs and corporations over these issues is
>impossible. Representation at the summit itself was a problem for
>many civil society groups and NGOs. As a UN initiative geared toward
>addressing the need for access to ICTs, particularly for developing
>countries, the problem of basic infrastructure needs such as adequate
>electricity supply, education and equipment requirements were not
>sufficiently addressed.
>
>Against this background, this paper argues that the question of scale
>is a central condition to the obtainment of democracy. Moreover, what
>models of democracy are global entities such as the WSIS aspiring to
>when they formulate future directions for informational policy? Given
>the crisis of legitimacy of rational consensus, deliberative models
>of democracy, this paper argues that democracy within information
>societies needs to be rethought in terms of organised networks of
>communication that condition the possibility of new institutions that
>are attentive to problems of scale. Such a view does not preclude
>informational networks that operate across a range of scales, from
>sub-national to supra-national; rather, it suggests that new
>institutional forms that can organise socio-technical relations in
>ways that address specific needs, desires and interests are a key to
>obtaining informational democracy.
>
>
>Bio
>
>Ned Rossiter is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media) at
>the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster, Northern
>Ireland.  Ned is co-editor of Politics of a Digital Present: An
>Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory (Melbourne:
>Fibreculture Publications, 2001) and Refashioning Pop Music in Asia:
>Cosmopolitan Flows, Political Tempos and Aesthetic Industries
>(London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). Ned is also a co-facilitator of
>fibreculture, a network of critical Internet research and culture in
>Australasia (http://www.fibreculture.org).
>
>
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>
>Tuesday 16 November, 2004
>time & venue tba
>
>Dr Soenke Zehle <(soenke.zehle /at/ web.de)>
>Research consultant, Transcultural Anglophone Studies
>(Tas), Saarland University, Germany
>
>Workshop
>
>Further details soon
>--
>Ned Rossiter
>Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media)
>Centre for Media Research
>University of Ulster
>Cromore Road
>Coleraine
>Northern Ireland
>BT52 1SA
>
>tel. +44 (0)28 7032 3275
>fax. +44 (0)28 7032 4964
>email: (n.rossiter /at/ ulster.ac.uk)

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Carpentier Nico (Phd)
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