Abstracts

Adam W. Flynn and Sarah Outhwaite
Love across Time and Space. Methods and Tools of Long-Distance Relationships

The modern long-distance relationship springs from technology, joining minds when matter cannot. Paradoxes of space grow more extreme as we strive for greater intimacy. The speakers will detail insights gained from maintaining an LDR over one year, ten-thousand miles of distance, and a twelve-hour time-shift. They will discuss the particular attributes of different communication media, and how communication objects come (and fail) to embody our lovers.


Johannes Grenzfurthner
I can count every star in the heavens above but I have no heart, I can’t fall in love. Computer technology in popular music.


Bourgeois culture was paralyzed and finally overrun by modern technologies which broke through the traditional class barriers. It went into a panic and produced these very stupid technophobic manifestos and images e.g. of “the computer”. Pop music discovered and explored the computer not only as a musical instrument but also as something to sing and reflect about in a less aversive way. In doing so it influenced the conception people had of computers. The public image of computers was shaped by groups such as Kraftwerk as well as through obscure Schlager songs such as France Gall's “Computer No. 3”. Not only was that image influenced by high culture computer panic but also by naïve technomania, and so it delivered the very dialectics of the computer as a means of cultural technology in capitalist society.


Christian Heller
Killing (the power of) Time. Archiving selves, cities, histories, and universes

To store the present and reconstruct the past: the extension of any information over time is a major challenge. It often involves lossy translation processes from decaying storage media of mind to decaying storage media of matter and vice versa. In this talk I want to explore some peculiar examples of such engineering exercises: 1. The preservation of the self. Achieving immortality in pyramids in history books, cryo-preservation and mind uploads. What information of mind and body is it that we need to store if we want to preserve our self for the future? Will post-singularity civilization be able to reconstruct all of us? 2. Reconstruction of physical environments, especially cities. Reconstructing past reality experiences in movies and video games. Storing three-dimensional snapshots of cityscapes in “Grand Theft  Auto” and “Google Earth” for the future. Augmented reality layers of the past over the present: rebuild the World Trade Center and the Berlin Wall at their original positions, via your mobile phone. 3. Flattening and postmodernization of history. Liberating history from the physical property of time, transforming it into a non-linear playground and weightless text to be toyed with freely. As history is just one more text between many, games like consciously alternate histories and new chronologies abound. 4. Cosmological limits to information storage and reconstruction. Is the universe a digital computing process, and if so, how large a hard disk do we need to store its data? Is consciousness stored in physical processes not yet computable by our digital computing machines?


Jana Herwig
The archive versus/as the repertoire


The discourse about archives is often based on an unchallenged distinction between “oral” and “literate”, or “verbal” and “textual” traditions. In reaction to this, Diana Taylor has proposed to investigate practices of the archive in opposition to such of the repertoire which require presence, participation and embodied performance. The talk seeks to take Taylor's proposal once step further in its application to online phenomena, specifically looking at image board 4chan where media technology (as a seeming epitome of the archive) and embodied practice (the users’ interaction and counteraction to the platform’s deletion routine) collaborate.


Herbert Hrachovec
Impressive. Moving Pictures moving Thought

Pictures are objects; pictures are cognitive constructions. They can neither lack a physical implementation not can they be devoid of persons using stuff to indicate something else. Pictorial structures impress themselves upon us, but only because we are impressionable and impressive ourselves. Avantgarde film has often explored these connections. Samples from the work of Kurt Kren and Dietmar Brehm will be discussed to investigate the confluence of sense impressions and making sense.


Lin Hsin Hsin
Demystification of Digital Media


Apart from expounding on the common “misconception” of what is and what isn’t considered as digital art, this lecture demonstrates many examples of 2D & 3D art forms and genres, based on Lin Hsin Hsin’s beliefs, processes and methodologies. While it does not detail the how-tos, it is anchored on Hsin Hsin’s Eco-Computing in Digital Media Initiatives (since 2007), which requires minimum computing resources. As a firm believer in “paradigm shift computing” in her visualization and practice, she managed to create a huge repertoire of art works (non-photorealistic and photorealistic paintings, sculptures, animations), designs (textile, furniture, jewelry etc.) and musical instruments, from virtual to real, using the mechanical mouse, algorithms and equations on the Linux platform.


Heather Kelley
Play/Tech/World

Heather Kelley is a media artist and video game designer. With the game collective Kokoromi, she produces and curates the “Gamma” game showcase promoting experimental games in a social context. Previously, Heather Kelley was Creative Director on “Breakaway”, the UNFPA’s electronic game to end violence against women. Her career in interactive entertainment has included games as a form of research, art games, mobile applications, AAA next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, handheld games and web communities for girls. Johannes Grenzfurthner (monochrom) will talk with Heather Kelley about the interrelation of technology, society and play.


Dmytri Kleiner
P2P communism vs. the client-server state

Drawing on classical political economy and the history of the internet and free culture, Dmytri Kleiner develops analogies between modes of production and network architecture to explain why capitalism will destroy the Internet and free culture, and why the only way to stop this is venture communism.


Kyle Machulis
Too Much


Video games these days strive for the newest and best ways to kick your senses in the nuts. Intense graphics, multi-channel sound, and now even augmented environments to enhance the experience outside the screen. This raises the question: how can we design a game that strips all this away but is still interesting? This talk covers development of a biometrics based video game with no graphics, no sound, and the simplest of controls (a single button). Using the player’s body as the game mechanic, we can still make games that are fun, difficult, and possibly even educational.


Mela Mikes
The doors of misperception

Within the discursive mainstream about Web 2.0 active content generation has been established as preferred term. Alongside this, active users’ self conceptions were more and more shifted from performative ones to mediated ones. My talk will try to question whether or not this transformation of terminology makes sense or if it points to other methodological problems within this discourse. Therefore I'll revisit a minor text of Michel Foucault about literature and some carefully selected cyberfeminist texts to point to the very foundations of methods used for analyzing Web 2.0 self-conceptions and representations. As I think that it cannot be the goal of a progressive discussion to reinforce very chauvinist concepts on the abstract level of terminology and methods.


Jane Tingley
Network Sculpture

As a sculptor I am very interested in the objects that constitute my installations and spend a lot of time exploring materiality and thinking about objecthood. I draw on a wide range of media, less concerned with the technological aspects of the medium than its semiotic implications. I am interested in the cultural meaning of material and process, and try to align material with concept. Beyond objecthood, space, and the experience of the viewer are also central concerns of my installation practice.  I create installations that use visual networks as a way of exploring the poetics and rethinking the phenomena of contemporary experience.  I am as interested in making installations that rethink our understanding of the body, as I am in exploring the viewer’s embodied experience of the installation space. I will talk about my past works about the body – Body; trichobothria and Peripheral Response, the body and its relationship to nature Plan(iPod)Installation, as well as the work I will produce during the paraflows residency.


Nina Wenhart
Word Magic

Aaa, sdafsda, sxjhk hfjk asfjkl. What reminds of onomatopoetry or a poem by Ernst Jandl, are actually tags that can be found in archives of media art. They describe and depict the contents of these archives. These words are magical because they can conjure up works and knowledge from the depths of the archive. What and if we actually find something depends significantly on descriptive metadata. A work, a word. And thus media art also takes up the quixotic battle for a standard terminology for media art and attempts to find the only true system of order. This presentation will provide insights into attempts to concretize ephemeral media art via descriptive metadata.