Hi. I've never posted anything to media curating, not sure i'm doing it
right, just wanted to say that i was touched by Rosanne's take on cyber
networks, conscious presence and art/media community. I should like to
develop these thoughts later, and i hope that others too, will respond to
this thread.
thanks,
Dafna Ganani
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Rosanne Altstatt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> Thank you for the invitation to put in my two cents this month. Many
> of you will know me from my time directing the Videonale Bonn and the
> Edith Russ Site for Media Art until I left Germany in 2004. I’ve been
> in Indiana ever since, mentoring students and conducting research at
> Purdue University, curating and writing about a host of different
> projects – some more and some less New Media.
>
> CRUMB asks this month how located are we with our bags full of located
> media, and I have to answer that the more locative media I’ve got, the
> less located I feel. Let me offer two examples:
>
> 1) While driving to Walter de Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” my
> car-mate couldn’t help checking her smart phone every few minutes to
> see if we were on track to this remote location, swerving slightly off
> the road each time she looked down. The gist of the driving
> instructions were: “Follow the road straight ahead for two hours, then
> turn right.” I kept saying: “Well, the sun is over there, so this road
> is still going south.” On a desert road in New Mexico, I felt
> comfortably located while she was somehow lost as an advancing blip on
> a screen.
>
> 2) In an 8-person meeting I attended last week, those checking their
> devices for facts were intermittently lost to the conversation, ceding
> leadership of the discussion to those making eye contact at the table
> and staying on topic. This says much about the location of
> consciousness and where people get their work done.
>
> My work is accomplished where I am able to locate conscious thought. I
> draw information out of the Internet and locative systems in order to
> serve what is going on at that center, but if I lose myself out in
> digital networks another type of connection is lost.
>
> Of course, work today is located both inside and outside digital networks:
>
> Example 3) A compendium of graphic novels about true stories of cancer
> in my geographic community of Lafayette, Indiana will be located in
> cyberspace as an ebook. It was also a work-on-paper gallery exhibition
> and will be printed as a paperback. For this, local stories were
> gathered online, advertised at small-town cancer fundraisers and
> support groups. Simultaneously, I created a local network of artists
> and script writers by seeking them out at comic conventions and
> symposia, street fairs, through recommendations and studio visits. We
> met regularly as a work group in coffee shops and at people’s houses;
> sometimes individually at my university office. The meetings were
> expanded in online groups and docs as well as a steady stream of
> emails. Both parts of this project – process and product – continually
> pass back and forth through digital gateways and wooden doors.
>
> Does it matter that we were bound by a geographic location? Yes,
> because that is where this group’s sense of itself as a community
> resides – sharing schools, health centers, music venues, comic book
> stores and Main Street. We also share social networking sites, which
> connect us to each other and the rest of our “friends” in the world.
>
> Digitally networked technologies are invaluable as gateways for
> locating, gathering and disseminating information, but they can also
> be over-valued. I need to re-value my actions at home – that centered
> space where consciousness resides – because we connect to others from
> here to create something meaningful. In my case, this makes me FEEL
> located and comfortable as more than a dot on a network.
>
> Cheers,
> Rosanne
>
--
Dafna Ganani-Tomares, Ph.D
http://minimalcomfort.org
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