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: [log in to unmask]
tel.+44 (0)28 7032 3275
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Monday 5 July, 2004
3-4 pm, Venue: L116, South Building
Dr Esther Milne <[log in to unmask]>
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 <[log in to unmask]>
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 <[log in to unmask]>
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 <[log in to unmask]>
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).
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Tuesday 19 October, 2004
1pm-2pm Venue: TBA
Ned Rossiter <[log in to unmask]>
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 <[log in to unmask]>
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: [log in to unmask]
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