DASH Archives - October 2010

From Roger Malina via YASMIN

Itsuo Sakane 8oth Birthday


Leave birthday greetings for him at:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=163319150348275

Itsuo Sakane’s book on his personal history and history of media art
will be published soon. We are organizing a big party to celebrate the
publication (and for his 80th birthday).
Please send a message well in time (Japan is in the earliest time
zone!) so that we can compile them as a surprise present for him.
Video messages are more than welcome! PLEASE SEND THE MESSAGE THROUGH
THE FOLLOWING LINK.

http://sakaneparty.eto.com/videomessage

If you are in Japan and can join , please contact Mr. Naniwada at
IAMAS. The dinner is 12,000 yen per person.

E-mail：naniwada@iamas.ac.jp

Please spread the words to those who know Sakane!

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=163319150348275

Roger Malina


====
Paul Brown - based in OZ April to November 2010
mailto:paul@paul-brown.com == http://www.paul-brown.com
OZ Landline +61 (0)7 3391 0094 == USA fax +1 309 216 9900
OZ Mobile +61 (0)419 72 74 85 == Skype paul-g-brown
====
Synapse Artist-in-Residence - Deakin University
http://www.deakin.edu.au/itri/cisr/projects/hear.php
Honorary Visiting Professor - Sussex University
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html
====

To all members of the CAS and DASH e-lists.  

On this auspicious date - 10/10/10 - take note:  there has been some confusion about the difference between the CAS and DASH e-lists recently and this is an attempt to make that difference clear and to say a little about our other online communications.

The Computer Arts Society maintains two public e-lists:

cas@jiscmail.ac.uk - is open (anyone can post to it - even non-list non-CAS members).  In order to control spam and ensure relevance I moderate the list.  It is used for announcements of interest to the community - and not just official CAS ones.  However this is for announcements concerning contemporary practice because our other list is:

dash@jiscmail.ac.uk [Digital ArtS Histories] - also a public, open, moderated list.  As the name implies this is the one for announcements of historical import (and again not just official CAS business).

We have a lot of people who are members of both lists so please don't post the same announcement to both unless it is exceptional and belongs in both categories (like the recent announcement of Herbert Franke's exhibition at ZKM).

It's best if you post directly to the list because you then get the replies (so in general please don't send stuff to me to pass on - though I do mostly handle the 'official' CAS ones!).  Plain text is encouraged but attachments are allowed.  We have members in the developing world who have slow/expensive internet access so small is beautiful.

Please use the jisc lists and encourage your colleagues to use them.  If something isn't deemed appropriate I will filter and respond.  If you don't know about jiscmail go to http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk and for more about jisc http://www.jisc.ac.uk

Stephen Boyd Davis maintains the CAS website:  http://www.computer-arts-society.org

Stephen also maintains a Facebook CAS group:  http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=111026792741 that is an open community discussion and also used for announcements.  If you have a Facebook presence you can join this group and participate (non-Facebook members can read it I think).

Membership of all our lists/groups is international with representation from most places in the world and announcements/posts can cover activities anywhere around the globe.  However English translation of foreign announcements must be provided (so I can moderate them!).

Thank you for your ongoing participation in the CAS and DASH e-lists and I look forward to hearing from you in the future.

With best wishes
Paul Brown
CAS Communications Officer

====
Paul Brown - based in OZ April to November 2010
mailto:paul@paul-brown.com == http://www.paul-brown.com
OZ Landline +61 (0)7 3391 0094 == USA fax +1 309 216 9900
OZ Mobile +61 (0)419 72 74 85 == Skype paul-g-brown
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/paulbrown.arttech
====
Synapse Artist-in-Residence - Deakin University
http://www.deakin.edu.au/itri/cisr/projects/hear.php
Honorary Visiting Professor - Sussex University
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html
====

MediaArtHistories edited by Oliver GRAU now out as educational edition (paperback)


With contributions by: Rudolf ARNHEIM, Andreas BROECKMANN, Ron BURNETT, Edmond COUCHOT, 
Sean CUBITT, Dieter DANIELS, Felice FRANKEL, Oliver GRAU, Erkki HUHTAMO, Douglas KAHN, 
Ryszard W. KLUSZCYNSKI, Machiko KUSAHARA, Timothy LENOIR, Lev MANOVICH, W.J.T. MITCHELL, 
Gunalan NADARAJAN, Christiane PAUL, Louise POISSANT, Edward A. SHANKEN, Barbara Maria STAFFORD 
and Peter WEIBEL


 "A rich selection of important texts by some of the most noteworthy figures 
in media art history, and together they will do much to shape the content of 
this new discipline."                                                  -- Charlie GERE - Art Book

"Hmmm. That looks pretty handy." -- Bruce STERLING

"With the growth of media art (and media art programs), MediaArtHistories 
is an important--and timely--book. Scholars, teachers, and artists all have 
much to gain from reading it."                                                 -- Dene GRIGAR

"The essays presented in MediaArtHistories comprise a compelling addition 
to the bookshelf of any academic interested in art history." 
                                                                    -- Paul THOMAS, realtime +onscreen 

"MediaArtHistories provides a wide view on the complex, in-progress field 
of media art, in which this volume intends to stand as one of the main 
bibliographical reference points."                 -- Horea AVRAM, Rhizome.org


CONTENTS: Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today's media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines--film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images. Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp's inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms--machine, media, exhibition--and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the "trained eye" of art history. 


WEBSITES:
BOOK  http://www.mediaarthistory.org/pub/mediaarthistories.html 
MAH Conference Series & Archive www.mediaarthistories.org 
FACEBOOK MAH Platform www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=36056054067&v=wall 
www.amazon.com  (->MediaArtHistories)

via spectre - http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre

new productivisms | nuevos productivismos | neue produktivismen
transversal web journal

This transversal issue reviews the historical experience of the Russian-Soviet avant-garde art produced during the 1910s and 1930s, with regard to two of the main tracks followed by its simultaneously political and artistic radicalization: productivism and factography. Our point of view is neither historicist nor nostalgic. Rather than the classical academic differentiation between historiographic, artistic and critical discourse, a three-fold approach undertakes to articulate a genealogy, to apply a critical reading, and to trace its becoming actual in contemporary practices.

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0910

contents
Doug Ashford: Group Material: Abstraction as the Onset of the Real
Marcelo Expósito: The New Productivisms
Devin Fore: «Arbeit sans phrase»
Brian Holmes: Into Information! Reversing History for the Present
Christina Kiaer: “Into Production!”: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism
Gerald Raunig: Changing the Production Apparatus. Anti-Universalist Concepts of Intelligentsia in the early Soviet Union
Hito Steyerl: Truth Unmade. Productivism and Factography
Dmitry Vilensky: Activist Club or On the Concept of Cultural Houses, Social Centers & Museums
Jaime Vindel: Tretyakov in Argentina. Factography and Operativity in the Artistic Avant-Garde and the Political Vanguard of the Sixties

In co-operation with the Museu d'Art Contemporany de Barcelona (MACBA) and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

discursive events in october

Decolonial Aesthetics
Colloquium with Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova
Academy of Fine Arts, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna, M13
5 October 2010, 17.00 - 20.00
(Creating Worlds Discursive Lines)
http://eipcp.net/projects/creatingworlds/files/events8/

Maurizio Lazzarato (Paris) / Stefan Nowotny (eipcp, Vienna):
"Das politische Ereignis"
12 October 2010, 19.00, Shedhalle Zürich
(Inventions. A Series of Double Lectures Actualising Post-structuralist Theories)
http://www.zhdk.ch/index.php?id=12058

Book presentations
Birgit Mennel, Stefan Nowotny, Gerald Raunig (Eds.), Kunst der Kritik
(republicart, vol. 10), Vienna: Turia+Kant 2010
- 13 October 2010, 19.00: Buchhandlung im Volkshaus, Zürich (with Stefan Nowotny and Gerald Raunig)
- 22 October 2010, 19.00: Depot, Vienna (with Isolde Charim, Ruth Sonderegger and the editors)
http://eipcp.net/calendar/1281030475

---
Creating Worlds
http://creatingworlds.eipcp.net

eipcp - european institute for progressive cultural policies
a-1060 vienna, gumpendorfer strasse 63b
a-4040 linz, harruckerstrasse 7
contact@eipcp.net
http://www.eipcp.net

The Digital Oblivion.
Substance and ethics in the conservation of computer-based art


International symposium
4 and 5 November 2010, 10.00–18.00
ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Lorenzstrasse 19
76135 Karlsruhe, Germany

digitalartconservation@zkm.org
http://www.zkm.de
http://www.digitalartconservation.org

Entrance free, no booking required
Languages: EN, DE, FR

Speakers:

Prof. Dr. Hans Belting Professor emeritus for the science of art and media theory, Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe
Prof. Dr. Edmond Couchot Professor emeritus Université de Paris VIII
Alain Depocas Director of the Centre for Research and Documentation, Daniel Langlois Foundation, Montréal
Herbert W. Franke artist, scientist and writer, Egling
Rosina Gómez-Baeza Tinturé Director, LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries, Gijon
Prof. Dr. Hans Dieter Huber Head of degree programme conservation of new media and digital information, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart
Antoni Muntadas Artist, New York
Daria Parkhomenko Director LABORATORIA Art & Science Space, Moscow
Dr. Ingrid Scheurmann Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz, professorship architectural heritage
and applied historical building research, Technische Universität Dresden
Prof. Dr. Bernhard Serexhe Head curator, ZKM | Medienmuseum, Karlsruhe
Prof. Dr. h.c. Peter Weibel CEO, ZKM | Karlsruhe
Dr. Klaus Weschenfelder President ICOM Germany
Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski Professor for media theory, Universität der Künste, Berlin


As part of the broader research project digital art conservation this intermational symposium aims to investigate the future of our digital cultural memory, focusing in particular on the preservation of computer-based art. 

For millennia, transmission systems with long-term stability shaped our sense of time and of history, helping form our image of ourselves and of the world. The ever-present threat to cultural heritage from external factors - whether war, deliberate destruction or processes of natural decomposition - meant that cultural memory was arranged with longevity and reliability in mind. 

For a couple of decades now, digitalisation has allowed the content of cultural memory to be more easily processed and circulated; via the internet electronic/digital material is in principle available to any user in any location at any time. However, the preservation of digital contents is fundamentally conditioned by the need to conform to an ever more rapid sequence of new technical systems. This functional obsolescence, along with technical systems' dependence on corporate strategies and commercial interests, presents a systemic threat to digital cultural memory. Again and again, the threat of obsolescence leads previous criteria of cultural memory - longevity and authenticity - ad absurdum.

In this way, the digital revolution has called into question the very preservation and survival of cultural memory. However, until now there has been almost no reflection on the far-reaching consequences of this systemic change in cultural memory. But we may ask: what fundamental underlying values can a society have, which merely disposes of an event-oriented short-term memory?

Blinded by the promises of prosperity deriving from the IT and entertainment industries, governments have thus far failed to develop strategies for safeguarding humanity's digital cultural memory. As long ago as 2003, the UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage noted that "The world's digital heritage is at risk of being lost to posterity. [ ... ] Digital evolution has been too rapid and costly for governments and institutions to develop timely and informed preservation strategies. The threat to the economic, social, intellectual and cultural potential of the heritage - the building blocks of the future - has not been fully grasped. " 

The practice and theory of art collecting and preservation has also seen a paradigm shift, presenting curators, collectors, scholars and conservators with a new set of as yet unsolved problems. Whereas traditional media and tools remained in the possession of artists and curators, new digital media have definitely reduced the autonomy of these cultural actors. It is not, as it is often claimed, that digital media art itself ages more quickly than traditional art forms. Rather, often after only a few years, the elements needed for artworks' preservation and exhibition - hardware and software, operating systems and programming knowledge - are no longer available. 

For digital media art this means that the faster technology develops, the shorter the half-life period of the artwork becomes. Dealing with digital artworks today, we have to expect major preservation threats to set in already within ten years of their creation. 

One approach to this problem of digital preservation is to investigate the relation of the material to the conceptual substance of the work. Here it seems that desperate pragmatism of repairing and stockpiling of obsolete technologies will quickly run dry. A second approach accepts the transience of the artwork as irrevocable, taking for granted the work's short-term nature as linked to a performative practice understood to be inherent to the time-based arts. 

Parallel to day-to-day collecting and exhibition practice - necessarily pragmatic - conservation theory has recently seen a normative debate on the ethics of preservation, a discussion comparable to developments elsewhere in the humanities and natural sciences, as well as in bioethics and environmental ethics. The conference's discussion of the ethics of conservation aims to overcome the current uncertainty surrounding the preservation of digital media art as part of our cultural heritage.

This set of interconnected themes forms the context for the questions posed by the first international symposium of digital art conservation, a three-year research project funded by the European Union. 


	• With general digitalisation rapidly moving from dream to reality, it is clear that all future generations will depend on computer networks as the most important and perhaps the only remaining loci of cultural memory. In addition to the constant danger of large-scale data-loss, there is also the associated risk that data may be undetectably filtered and manipulated, making it impossible to establish authenticity.

	• The high cost of long-term conservation or even the restoration of stored digital data far surpasses the limited budgets of libraries, archives, museums and other cultural institutions. 

	• The promise offered by every new digital storage medium - ever larger capacity - has misled to the taking of greater risks. However, the major assurance of ever greater data security has not been delivered until today. In the last two decades our absolute dependence on digital media has become so taken for granted that to call it into question is often decried as “unscientific” or “pessimistic”.

	• Large quantities and varieties of digital data bring with them an ever-increasing need for care and administration. This demands a high level of reliance in the professionalism and absolute independence of administrators, a trust which must extend across generations and political regimes of any kind. Given recent experience, it is hard to be at all optimistic about this. 

	• Therefore we must ask questions on a global scale. We must ask which institutions, in a variety of national, governmental and commercial contexts, make decisions about the very contents of cultural memory which are to be digitised. Who and how do we decide on questions of selection, storage-worthiness, handling, research and access? 

	• What consequences will the ongoing systemic change of cultural memory have for our consciousness of time and of history, and for our image of ourselves and the world?

	• Are traditional criteria for conservation - a work of art's originality, longevity and inherent economic value - at all applicable to new media art? Considering the specific problems of the conservation of computer-based art, which are the conclusions we have to draw about the characteristics traditionally ascribed to the nature of the artwork?

	• Given the considerable technical difficulties involved, are museums and collections in any position to adhere to the generally high standards in the preservation of digital media art? With increasingly scarce financial resources, can they at all be expected to preserve digital media art? 

	• Should digital media art - like time-based arts (film, music) - be regarded as immaterial and ephemeral and is the adequate mode of presentation for it to be at any one time adapted to any particular “performance situation”.

	• What are the requirements of future-proof documentation of the “substance” of digital media art, if we want to preserve knowledge about both concept and material? 

	• Should standards of best practice be developed for the conservation and collection of digital media art? Should minimum standards of conduct and performance be set to which museum professional staff may reasonably aspire at an international level? 

	• Should museums and collections strive for an internationally-recognised convention for the preservation of digital media art, similar to the various ICOMOS Charters (Athens 1931, Venice 1964)?

	• Does the ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums, as revised by the 2004 ICOM General Assembly in Seoul, apply to the specific problems of digital media art? 

	• Should digital media art fall within the remit of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003)? Is digital media art already protected by the UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage? These conventions do not in any case directly address specific issues concerning the conservation of digital media art.
 

Following the symposium, on 6 November 2010, the exhibition Elmgreen & Dragset.
Celebrity – The One and the Many will open at the ZKM | Museum for Contemporary Art.


====
Paul Brown - based in OZ April to November 2010
mailto:paul@paul-brown.com == http://www.paul-brown.com
OZ Landline +61 (0)7 3391 0094 == USA fax +1 309 216 9900
OZ Mobile +61 (0)419 72 74 85 == Skype paul-g-brown
====
Synapse Artist-in-Residence - Deakin University
http://www.deakin.edu.au/itri/cisr/projects/hear.php
Honorary Visiting Professor - Sussex University
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html
====