massive busy-ness over the weekend with the ~/Connected conference at the Lasipalatsi. Tapio had asked me earlier if I could help out with activities on the ground, and although I was pretty busy anyway, I was around to help, then ended up being quite involved in the discussions, and even made a short public presentation at the end in Bio Rex, dealing with best-practice scenarios for education/learning situations. Polar Circuit was held up as that model in learning situations, along with the idea of open-platform, socially balanced situations.

/~Connected press releases for local and translocal use

Cultural industries and independent media cultural production are of primary importance for Finnish policy development, as a new program, “Content Finland” is being drafted during next year. In each European country, goals of both national and transnational media culture have been met with different strategies. Through /~Connected knowledge and shared experience, it is possible to form models of best practice – and principles for both national and European policy.

The driving force behind this event and series of other meetings prior to it is the ECB, European Cultural Backbone (http://ecb.t0.or.at/, http://www.e-c-b.net/). It is a network of media cultural organizations, centers, and active individuals throughout Europe, not only European Union member countries. To quote Dr. Peter Wittmann, Austrian State Secretary for the Arts, “The European Cultural Backbone is the logical extension of this ongoing dialog between cultural practitioners and policy makers regarding strategies of “practice to policy” on both national and European levels.”

The Main organizer of /~Connected, the Lasipalatsi Media Center, also seeks to discuss how European media centers could increasingly collaborate. How to best connect venues of presenting media culture and sites that produce it? Support of networks, bandwidth, mobility, distribution and production are key factors for policy discussion.

Traditionally, in a European democracy, public space has been defined through access to public institutions, freedom to move in city spaces and through the existence of certain democratic instruments such as public libraries and publicly supported broadcast media. New media, Internet in particular, has made it possible to more actively shift content production to smaller units or groups. Creation of public space can mean support for content production and communication that does not focus on a single mass audience, but particular communities (or consumers) and layers within the larger society and the networked world. Major issue for debate is thus to consider, how to best connect various models of best practice and policy that enable cultural production in a networked, changing Europe.

The seminar takes place in the very center of Helsinki, in Lasipalatsi Media Center (http://www.lasipalatsi.fi). Meals during the conference program are provided for by the organizers and there is no attendance fee. We are providing air fare and accommodation for a group of participants that comes from smaller media centers and organizations. We are happy to assist your travel arrangements by providing information on accommodation and flights.

/~CONNECTED brings together practitioners, producers and policy makers within contemporary media culture in Europe. Its attempts to create exchanges of experience and information between organizations and individuals from different fields: media cultural organizations, media centers, policy makers on a local, national and European level, media art organizations, corporate research labs and university researchers.

Following events such as P2P conference in Netherlands and Networking Centers of Innovation in Austria, it explores the ways in which local experiences can be compared, exchanged and rewritten to form models of best practice.

The event will officially launch the ECB, European Cultural Backbone, a network based on trust and a shared interest to promote a rich media cultural practice, which already flourishes in Europe. The network proposes that an Internet Backbone or a set wide bandwidth would be subsidized by the EU in order to enable transnational media production, broadcast transmission of events and inexpensive communications. The ECB acts as an advisory body for the policy makers nationally and within the EU.

/~CONNECTED is very much about the goals of the ECB:

1) Bandwidth for media culture
2) Support for models of best practice
3) Active investigation of what European media culture consists of
4) Enhanced networking between media cultural organizations, individual hubs” and policy makers.

/~CONNECTED refers to the ways in which media cultural local practices and organizations create collaboration, projects, discourse and policy across and partly independent of national borders. Emerging networks, projects and content are no longer international, but translocal by nature, already connected.

Josefin Starkenberg, Atle Barcley, Pernilla Edholm, Anna Hedberg, Tomas Eriksson, Mattias Rylander, Janne Johannesen, Alexander Rishaug, Narve Hovdenakk, Andreas Berthling, Nina Hemmingsson, Steven Cuzner, Stein Erik Hansen

it also occurred to me that I have always been so into remote presence that it represents a real threat to my psychological integrity. (see above). each day these days I hesitate calling what few people here I would call friends. and then I understand that I have few here. few anywhere, because I am always elsewhere. and age is a factor. more difficult to make new friends. there is always something missing — that depth of time-passed that is wrapped into old friendships. and everybody seems, at this ending/beginning time, to be buried in their respective places, nothing but survival on mind, and media in eye. and a curious nonchalant dread of the future. “email is the entry drug” Volker quotes the head of CISCO systems as saying. he is more than right.

Sixten Therkildsen, Minna Nikola, Mikko Rönkä, Eija Mäkivuoti, Heikki Männikkö, Joona Jarvela, Mari Keski-Korsu, Riikka Makinen, Mindaugas Gapsevicius, Kjell Hansson, Norris Koppel, Elina Hartzell, Tiina Ekosaari, Sirpa Vaara, Nadja Franz, Pasi Lehtinen, Hanna Tuominen

neoscenes occupation project 2 rattles and rolls along with a fine bunch of international art&media students!

Flintstones on teevee. why am I watching?

fortune cookie:

A phone call to a good friend will ease your mind and lift your spirits. Lucky numbers 3,4,10,24,36,38

so it goes.

Beatrix Stoermer, Meike Winters, Shelley Lawson, Klaus Birk, Petra Bohl, Kirsten Pilih, Björn Peters, Ines Pais, Marlena Sang, Nadine Ritter, Antje Krause

into the NextFiveMinutes conference. I have been burned out for much of the time for some reason, almost catching a cold yesterday evening, then this morning, spraining my back with the most minimal movement zipping up my suitcase, I wasn’t even bending over. scared the shit outta me. my panel presence (Tactical Education/Media Competence) was shortly after, and that went quite well, but by mid-afternoon I hobble back the the hotel, barely able to walk because of the sciatic pain. missed an appointment with Nan which I was quite looking forward to, not to mention several dialogues with new contacts. really don’t believe it, that I have done something serious. been stretching all afternoon and evening between bouts resting in bed. nothing else to do! Faugh! miss a dinner with an interesting artist. following are notes for the Tactical Education presentation (on the neoscenes occupation project):

Floris Vos, Laurens Kolks, Pieter Snijders, Chris Kabel, Aline te Kiefte, Chantal van Heeswijk, Murielle Epskamp, Richard Seabra

arrived in a snow-free urban zone from a historical fortress sheathed in ice, snow, and rime. Best Western Hotel. just like all others. cars rev their engines and burn rubber at each stop Light. what is this about? can’t do that in Helsinki. that would be useless as a display of aggression or macho. Journey to the Center of the Earth plays on cable, here I am in another box with teevee fed in, and I turn it on.

Henrik Ahlberg, Kjell Hansson, Sofia Sundberg, et al

no record… :-(

Tuomas Mathelein, Henri Peltola, Mikko Rönkä, Karri Pöykiö, Sari Winberg, Reeta Parkkinen, Mari Keski-Korsu, Eija Mäkivuoti, Tommi Piirainen

along with neoscenes occupation 1

after a day at Hershey Park, cooking in the summer sun. here in a cheap motel in Hometown, Pennsylvania. Loki crashed in bed after a stimulating day. too much sun, too much heat, cotton candy, dolphins, Ferris wheel, and roller coasters. dosing of Amurika. he and Sarah seem to compliment each other. we hit the road to get to this place. and the twistedness of it all. on the road. in the dark of this place. stories of Armageddon continue to mount. dwelling on it is senseless. it’s the media circus. it is inevitable that this happen at this time. time. running. the movements bear witnesses. the madness of things. of things. what has gone down this month. it is only the body that carries some continuity. that it was there, that it is now here.

Ulrike Ettinger, Frank Dehn, Rudi Refflinghaus, Aschchen Orsepian

head over to C3 to meet Jukka and Andrea. Andrea and I go to lunch. she tells the story that any non-Hungarian monarch who wore the ancient Hungarian crown went totally mad; that the crown is a very powerful antenna with carefully designed receiving and grounding mechanisms. there were a special cadre of handlers who had specific instructions handed down over generations on what could and could not be done with the crown, so powerful and dangerous it was. Jukka meets us later. Back at Andrea’s office I check my email and notice a CD of Sufi music with Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn — I write down the CD catalog number, and later Andrea gives me a URL to check out featuring Sufi music. several calls later, we are able to connect with Miklos who heads both the C3 and the Inter(digital)media program at the Academy of Fine Art. the rest of the afternoon I spend with Jukka, who gives me a show of the project he has been working on during his residency at C3. an interactive piece based on MAX software and David Rokby’s VNS (Very Nervous System).

Juhani Räsinen, Heidi Tikka, Pia Lindman, et al …

Juggling mental images, virtual being-ness, weather impressions, family, others, water, body, rain. I saw a coyote loping along the road this morning on the way over to Jim and Janet’s for breakfast. Angelique made biscuits and gravy. Jim was out waiting for a javelina to show up at a friends house — I guess you could call it vermit huntin’ — inside the town limits, and a big javelina it was rumored to be.

The Stupid Bowel, as I named it, was today. I was pleased that during that spectacle of spectacles, the internet was FAST! Like, Blazing! Wish it was always that way … Alexandra and I finally touched base with an IRC test this evening for something over an hour. I am having difficulty putting some kind of deconstructive take on this whole eight dialogues project. It is carrying energy, of that I am certain. The energy is real time, but the effect of the text mediation, the time lapse, the technical interface, and the perception/manifestation of physical presence. I have been having trouble typing all day, too, inverting letter order. Don’t understand that. I wouldn’t mind a better keyboard and working situation here at the house. I work standing up for my back and then my feet and legs just go crazy. I have never been so conscious of my body and its limits as I have these past weeks here in Arizona.

Sattva-Hanna Toivianen, Marjaana Sallantaus, Tanja Koponen, Mitro Kontturi, Sari Tervaniemi, Lina Tegman, Hanna Maria Anttila, Elizabeth Zambelli, Trina Mielonen, Kaarina Ormio, Jani Possijarvito, Melanie Lauz, Marina Siglar

Seppo Koskela, Tanja Koponen, Liisa Vähäkylä, Kati Åberg, Alli Savolainen, Aino Martikainen, Jukka Savelainen, Pirkko Roihu

Just got back from Phoenix where I stayed overnight with Tom and Dawn after dropping Aunt Mary at the airport and visiting with Jason and Angelique for a couple hours and running some errands around town. It approached 115F yesterday, the heat making everything vibrate and shimmer. Getting in and out of the car, into and out of air-conditioned spaces has always bothered me, and this day was no exception. Yet another example of how we mediate what the world begs to impress us with — the weather. I find life in air-conditioning is hermetic, and leads to short-sightedness and isolation. Combined with all the other amenities like the new 300-channel-plus digital teevee systems, automated coffee-maker and lawn sprinkler system, and the separation from the environment is nearing completion. It seems the only time that real life impinges is in the form of a natural disaster or through the random acts of violence that are inflicted by other humans or even by some level of technological intervention like the automobile. This idea of mediation is beginning to make me more than a little crazy. I would seek to live an authentic life on this planet, at this time, for myself and those around me, yet each day I encounter more and more ways of being cut off, isolated, and separated from the milieu of existence. How is it possible to begin stripping these filters away without becoming socially isolated from those other humans around? It just dawned on me that something in what I say hearkens back quite some time to the laments of St. Augustine. His solution was to simply pull out of the race, the rat-race, the gaming, the spectacles — whatever separated him from authentic life…

Too late came I to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh, yea too late came I to love thee. And behold, thou wert within me, and I out of myself, where I made search for thee. — St Augustine

Another day lost in a haze. I was having computer problems, but I seem to have solved them. Actually, it was just a stupid oversight that cost me $18.00 to set right. I forgot that my scanner needed a SCSI terminator on it, and so I left that back east with all my other junk. I had to go out and buy another one. I am consuming media here, helplessly. I am unable to avoid turning on the teevee to watch the shameless hucksterism of the Olympics and the breathless and paranoid 24-HOUR BOMBING SPECIAL BRIEFING UPDATE COVERAGE, not to mention the absolutely disgusting back-patting tunnel-vision attitude about the TWA 800 incident. I know that Dan would be sick with the sensationalism. And the advertising. The actual amount of time spent on the Olympic competition. Maybe 20% of the time. The complex way of mixing the visuals down — distorting of time and space … The heavy nationalistic slant on the coverage is shocking. Snide comments by the announcers — for example, during the opening ceremonies, the announcers began to discuss the political situation in China when that countries athletes came marching out. And so on. Actually I hardly want to discuss this, rather leave it as simply another example of The Spectacle.

In other parts of the world there are people who are born, live, and die in a perpetual crowd. To be always visible — to live in a swarm of eyes — a special expression must develop. Face coated with clay. The murmuring rises and falls While they divide up among themselves the sky, the shadows, the sand grains. — Tomas Tranströmer

07 1996′, ’30 3357

Gerardo Yepiz writes:

La frase magica de hoy es: “Everything is true as long as you believe it…”

migraine headache for much of the day. This is not explained completely by a glass of wine late in the evening last night. Nor a lack of sleep. Nor the late drive to the airport and back. I haven’t had an eye examine in seven years, and I have a suspicion that this might be part of the problem, along with damaged lenses caused when Loki knocked my glasses onto the tile floor of the locker room at the pool in Dalvík.

… Was that today I kissed you goodbye and sped away in a yellow cab? It rained all day today in New York. the cathartic yet intensely melancholic type of rain that comes. Was it yesterday the Polaroid snapshots in my hand were taken?. … — Vincent Katz

Alyssa and I have breakfast at the famous Five Star Diner on Rt. 202. A favorite place of mine especially after I have been imbibing all sorts of travel-food and foreign breakfasts. I order a stack of blueberry pancakes, but can hardly enjoy them for my pounding head and watering eyes. I go home — well, where exactly IS home anymore? Where my hat is hung? Where my bags spring open, revealing a portable computer, important papers, video tape and slides (for lecturing), a portable tape deck, tapes, CD’s, camera, film — enough techno crap to … If I was only carrying my notebook and clothes, I would be a Lighter Man. Anyway, the issue of home base is all the more intense these days when I find I can’t really get anything done. I need a place, a base.

Up early yet again (as I begin to move west in time zones). I head into London to SHOP. This is an automatic response to the concept that I am getting on a plane bound for Iceland in two days. Despite the fact I have no money to spend. I worry, but hope I will get some soon … I buy a book and a kite for Loki. And some food stuff. And some blank tapes and film (Tri-X is still sold here in the UK but is bloody expensive compared to NYC, so I only buy three rolls.) This will, I hope, take me to the end of June in Iceland and to NYC … It is intense to be in the center of a City. I want to take full advantage of things here, but find myself rather exhausted from all the activity of the last two weeks (not to mention the upcoming few days which will take me to Bath, Winchester, Heathrow, Reykjavík, and finally to Akureyri, a town in the north of Iceland…). Anyway.

Slept in and spent the morning repacking things as I had left one bag with David — oh man, more weight! I can’t believe how much I have to carry now! It is beginning to get absurd. Carrying a computer, audio deck, audio tapes, video tapes, slides, camera, film, not to mention various CD’s, Zip disks, floppies, and DAT tapes. If I subtracted all the ART teaching material, I would have maybe five kilos of clothes, a notebook, and some miscellaneous garbage. As it is, though, I must have 50 kilos of burden. David, Francis, and I took a drive over to the college in Canterbury to see a current exhibition of his Canon photocopy collage works, then a quick nip into Canterbury for me to exchange my Deutsch Marks for pounds, and a beer, then to the station … Took the train to Victoria Station and the Tube to Ravenscourt Park to Joanna’s place.

Volker drove me into Köln to the Hauptbahnhof to catch the 1200 IC train Jacques Brel to Brussels, where I caught the Eurostar to Ashford in Kent where David and Francis were waiting to get me. David had just done a 100 mile cycle race that afternoon, so he was in prime form. Enough to force Francis and I to watch a VERY BAD early-1970′s B film Cronenberg’s Videodrome — one of his favorite pastimes is collecting and watching examples of bad-ass video!

Up early again. Sunshine. 0930 ferry into town, packed everything last night, so took my backpack over to the Silja terminal and left it there in a locker, then went direct over to Muu to get one more fix of fast digital life for the time being. I meet Tapio at Café Fazer, off the Esplanade. This week he is attending a conference put on by the American Studies Department of the University of Helsinki concerning a critique of media and culture. The prospectus looks, well, typically academic, and it is certain that they have good funding given the number of American … academics … giving papers. We have a long conversation about some of the issues that concern us both. At the moment the boat is slowly pirouetting away from the dock and heading past Suomenlinna to the open Baltic. This ship is more strange and less comfortable that the Silja boat I took to Turku. There is an open five story mall down the center, and aside from the sun deck on the top, there are no places to simply sit and enjoy the mode of transportation. Everything is done to distract the passengers from the idea that they are moving on the (sometimes savage) sea. There are bars, a casino, restaurants, and shops, not to mention the obnoxious Tax Free Market. (We are now passing through the narrow strait next to Suomenlinna which can’t be more than 200 meters wide — you can almost reach out and touch the battlements of the fortress — people are standing there waving. We take a sharp right-hand turn and are almost to open ocean.) Behind my head a bad American teevee program, maybe BabeWatch, blares, the speaker keeps cutting out, giving a surreal quality to the already stilted monologues. Nobody cares, they read the subtitles. The only place I could locate an electric plug to run this machine was in the casino, and already, at 6pm it is filling up with people and, consequently, smoke. Europeans are smokers. Maybe not like the Chinese, but there are plenty of them puffing away. I occasionally have to do the same — if you can’t beat them, join them — smoke just to survive the smoke. Hack hack hack. Moving on. I sadly see my last of, Finland for the next few months. Of course it is only just now getting warm again, so, aside from the weekend before last at the summer house on the west coast, it hasn’t been much of a summer yet. When I hear from email connections in warmer climes, I really have to ignore the weather data. Sweltering in NYC, hot and dry in Colorado as Nick writes:

It’s been scorchin’ here, 90+ and dry. Lilacs did bloom this year…first time ever (since we’ve been here). Not much time for landscaping/yard work. Gardening is still a plan but may need to hire roto-tilling … where are you when I need you, haaaa?

Well, I wouldn’t mind a little scorching at the moment. I still have to wear long underwear! Oh gosh. I remember visiting with Nick and Deb last summer and volunteering to clean the gutters and the roof at mid-day when it was at least 100F (what, 42C?). Most of my friends from the US really can’t understand why I actually moved to a small volcanic island in the North Atlantic, right on the Arctic Circle, when I used to say that any temperature below 70F (19C) was f**king freezing. I admit, I was thoroughly spoiled with my three year stint living in Santa Monica, six blocks from the very beaches where BabeWatch is filmed, as well as living in Colorado where statistically there are 330 days of sunshine each and every year … I guess I made the move for LOVE, at least that’s what I call it now, in retrospect, but who knows? Digressing, now there sits a crowd of Swedish kids in their early 20′s. Each talking on their mobile phones to some invisible connection, smoking and already drunk enough to be slurring their speech. Obviously the phone is the status symbol of the age. Tapio mentioned at lunch that between the two mobile communication providers in, Finland there were over a million-and-a-half accounts — in a country of five million, that is one per household! And this development is only three years old! Astonishing! I still find it rather obsequious for people to be going on and on while standing or sitting in public transportation. This odd juxtaposition of private and public. It has to mediate the content in most cases — reducing it to a certain formalized blather. And perhaps this very page here is another form of the same type of public/private inversion, of artificial presence and being. Around 2200 I unplugged and went to the upper deck to enjoy the Arctic sunset.

The slowness of the darkening is quite special. After the first eventide on the train when arriving in Turku, I find quite some difference being in the water. The darkening has a totally different character and expression. The water enters a shivering dialogue with the sky. The only darkness is held by the thin lines of land which slowly sink out of sight as we pull away from the south coast of, Finland. There is a blue-ing of everything. As though the world becomes immersed in a transparent ice of ether. As though the world here begins silently to remember its burial under the massive thousands of feet of glacier. It is a land that is still rising from that era of oppression, islands growing each year, sea shallowing. The moon is broadening its scimitar. Venus there. A thin band of cloud, like a chalk line, floats, glowing, close over the point on the horizon where the sun vanished. Surrounding our boat, scattered on this half-plane intersection of shimmering chill a few kilometers distant, are other ships. All steaming west, a flotilla, but each one knows nothing of the other except the failing truth of vision and perhaps virtual radar images. and wakes which tell something of the past and passing. I go back to the lowest deck to cabin 2006, bunk D. I had stopped there briefly when boarding the ship, meeting a Finnish man, named Juha-Pekka, maybe 30 years old. He said he was going to sleep, so I left and went to do some work. When I returned, I entered into a strange dialogue that went on for an hour. He was obviously agitated about something, and bit by bit I learn something of his story. He has left, Finland. He was forced to leave the country by relatives who wanted to put him back in an asylum. He had already spent a year in one under a regimen of various drugs to keep him ‘in control’. He is a musician who played in a number of bands, and who simply wanted to write “pure music”. He had nothing with him, save the clothes on his back and a sheaf of musical scoring notebooks, no money, no passport, no destination, no friends or family in Sweden. He was very distraught with worry. He had left his wife who he loved very much and he hope she would come live with him wherever he ended up. I encouraged him by sharing some my difficulties, and saying to him that if he needed to write pure music, then that is what he had to do, and he made the right choice to leave the threat of drugged imprisonment, and he had chosen the right things to have with him — the blank musical scores which he had gotten at the conservatory. He said he had been teaching at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. I also gave him some traveling tips — like how to wash ones socks and take a hot shower whenever possible — as one never knows when the next opportunity might be. To be sure, I was a little nervous about being in the room with him, seeing his agitation and especially upon hearing he had been committed before, but after a while I understood that while he might have been a bit unstable, he was not going to do anything crazy. He thanked me for listening and talking to him, especially as he could practice his English and learn more how to travel. I finally was able to crawl into bed and plug my ears and try sleeping. As I mentioned before there were lots of teenagers on board, seemingly without adult supervision of any kind. At one point while wandering around the ship, I come across a group of ten young teenage boys carousing with one young girl who was completely drunk and was pulling her dress up to her shoulders as she stumbled around the deck. There were cabins full of kids across the hall and a great racket spawned of drunkenness mixed with de-flowering continued until at least 0500. I didn’t sleep too well. The other cabin-mate was a Norwegian man who I didn’t really meet — he came in later and left early in the morning. I did hear him get up and yell at the kids across the hall at one point. The fourth mate, an old alcoholic Finn made it to the room once early in the evening where he left an empty bottle of vodka on his bed and then again at 0700 when he came in, turned on the Lights, and proceeded to try to have a loud conversation with Juha-Pekka who ignored him. The old man was totally drunk and stumbled out a few minutes later with me yelling at him to turn off the Lights. So it goes.

Here at Martin and Selma’s place in the ‘burbs. They have a daughter, Cristel, 12, and a son, Stefan, 18, who lives in his own apartment nearby. Quiet and not much happening. I am being lazy. Watched the World Ice Hockey Championships on teevee from Vienna with Martin. First Canada vs Russia last night, and then Norway vs Sweden. And now watching one of the arch-spectacles on Euro-telly — where national winners compete to see who can best imitate of some star — from Meat Loaf and Whitney Houston to Elton John and so on. Andy Warhol’s platitude of the fifteen-minutes-of-fame is working itself out — an expansive spectacle as vapid and mindless as I have seen since the nationalist mediocrity of the EuroVision Song Contest. Gees. Vanishing Point. Pin Head. As insipid as any Hollywood production. Gag.

A busy day today, with lots of possibilities. I had lunch with Heidi Grundmann of Kunstradio, a program of ORF, Austrian National Radio. She is the director of this innovative program which has a regular 40 minute weekly broadcast of a variety of art radio programming. Most of the things you will hear on Kunstradio are works made especially for radio, although the progam has an Internet presence and has initiated a number of cross-media projects like Horizontal Radio and a new project Rivers and Bridges. This latter project looks interesting, and I have been thinking today of possible things to do as a participant. As my current web site is subtitled a bridge from eye to soul, there seem to be some common threads, most especially in the networking I have been involved with for the past ten years. Heidi and her husband, Bob Adrian X are pioneers in applied technology in experimental arts and networking, and both of them have been working in this field since at least the early 70′s. After spending a couple hours with Heidi and her assistants (Elizabeth Zimmermann and August Black, an American who, coincidentally, is on leave as a student at Syracuse University), I went to the EA Generali Foundation to see a video exhibition. And then I got online FOR FREE from the library of the Technical University again. Tomorrow I will use the facilities to do some web work, transferring files like this one from my PowerBook to the PC’s they have there and thence to my web site in Iceland…

John Paul Chaplin, Rosey Hara, Lauren Alesso, Mark O’Connell, Stephen George, Susan Feeney, Leina Minakawa, Kate Morro, Jenna Keith, John Corbett, Kelly Donnelly, Deb Farrell, Daria Blake, John Sanzi, John Hay, Nancy Burns, Dave Gyscek, Lynn Boutote, Brian Sheppard, Julie Wright, Maria Melpignano, Alicia Roberts, John May, Matt Zorumski, Drew Rodgers, Luke O’Neill, Jeff Wheeler

Along with the 24-hour internet collaboration

Early in the morning David and I headed for Winchester where he is Head of the Printmaking Department at the Winchester School of Art. David had invited me as guest lecturer for a week after his visit to Iceland last fall. Thanks David! I’m basically unemployed these days, and although the travel is expensive, making a bit of money here and there is a life-saver. And anyway, I love to be doing this kind of teaching work!

The academic program that David has set up in the Printmaking Department is a dynamic combination of visiting tutors and regular advisers for the three years of study. He has opened up the system for the students to actively pursue whatever medium suits their work — photography, video, digital media (although they unfortunately do not yet have Internet access), audio, along with more traditional working techniques on paper.

ISEA 96 will be held in Rotterdam and promises to be an interesting get-together, returning to the Dutch roots as it were.

Lots of new things after ISEA 95 in Montréal!

Bonnie Mitchell ran the ChainReaction project out of the CyberPort of the symposium…

It was good seeing Ed Stasny and Jon Van Oast of OTiS fame. We had some meals together, caught some of the exhibitions surrounding the symposium, and habituated the CyberPort. It was great finding out more about the inside of OTiS and all the work the our beloved Ed does (OTiSians all know this anyway), and some interesting stuff about Jon’s Web work. I admire these guys immensely. They hacked away all week at the newest OTiS project MONGOCOSM… Check it out! And they are implementing an enormous globe-encompassing plan to totally revamp OTiS via EGADS (Electronic Global Art Databasing System). WOW! Can’t wait to see that dOOds! Yeah, it was a good opportunity to ask all kinds of questions about the higher levels of coding/hacking work that both of them are adept at — I learned a lot. Soon I will develop and post a picture of the two of them at the site of a major crack in the earth’s surface right there in the middle of Montreal…

several hundred students from the print-making, textile, ceramics, graphic design, mixed-media, painting, and sculpture areas!

no record… :-(

This article expresses a few personal ideas about changing the educational structure of the Icelandic Academy of Art to stimulate what is presently an introverted and socially isolated program. Although the suggestions are presented in relation to expanding the existing photography and electronic media program, they relate also to the general situation at the Academy as of late 1994. (ed: not as prescient a text, when retrospecting from 2011, given the development of the Internet, but there are some valid points. And, the Academy went through a transition fours years after this was written in which many of the recommendations noted herein were instituted. Pity I had already left Iceland by that time.)

The importance of a challenging media arts program in contemporary art institutions is well known. Almost all academies and departments of art in the developed world are making regular use of photography, computers, and associated digital mediums as enormously powerful and flexible art/design tools.
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To write an all-encompassing article about the ever-changing states of cybernetics in art and culture is virtually impossible. Although every digital machine is grounded in the balanced order of Eastern religions through its binary yin-yang core, the one fundamental concept that dominates digital arts today is chaos. Furthermore,chaos and change are themselves only elements of the vast collective rush of information experience that is carrying us on into the virtual spaces of post-industrial society.

I recently enjoyed the very chaotic experience of attending the Fifth International Symposium on Electronic Art in Helsinki, co-sponsored by the Inter-Society on Electronic Arts (ISEA) and the Media Lab of the University of Art and Design (UIAH). The five-day conference in late August was attended by around 400 people and covered a wide range of topics, while a parallel array of artistic side-shows provided absolute proof of the far-ranging activity happening in cyberspace arts.
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