REMINDER - Deadline For PAPER and PROJECT PROPOSALS: 15 September 2009 Call for Papers, Art Projects and Interventions, Workshops, Roundtables ISEA 2009 - 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art Hosted by the University of Ulster in association with Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology 23rd August - 1st September 2009, Belfast, London/Derry, Coleraine, Dublin and Dundalk http://www.isea2009.org ISEA 2009 will be concerned with Engaged Creativity in Mobile Environments. The incessant change of physical and virtual environments under the influence of global capital and mass migration as well as the fluidity of personal and social relationships effected by digital information and communication technologies has come to determine the life experience for billions of people. These conditions radically and rapidly alter the ways we communicate, inter- and transact, how we make meaning of the world and how we conduct our lives along dramatically changing fault lines of the private and the public. Digital technologies as the fuel of global capital have not only effected dynamic and increasingly precarious labour relations. They underpin and challenge the negotiation of political and economic, social and cultural, religious and territorial conflicts and the re/organisation of society and its spaces alongside changing notions of democracy, citizenship and (self-) governance. ISEA 2009 seeks to explore how creative strategies explore and engage with these fundamental issues. The University of Ulster will be hosting the ISEA 2009 symposium in association with academic partners in the Republic of Ireland and Scotland, national and international industry and business sponsors, and through partnership activities with a host of arts and cultural organisations across the region. As well as activities taking place at the various physical locations across the region, all components of the symposium will be made available to a wider international public electronically for on-line viewing and with opportunities for participating in key debates through live web- streaming. CALL FOR PAPERS - ACROSS EIGHT SUB-THEMES Papers are invited for ISEA 2009 that will illuminate both the near and long term future of digital media culture. Papers which present research outcomes, track trends or developments, describe case studies or works in progress, are speculative projection, challenge existing paradigms or record a history, are all welcome. Submissions are encouraged from any creative, professional or scholarly field that relates to communications, art/ design, cultural expression, practice and aesthetics, and the technical means by which they are enabled. The sub-themes: . Citizenship and contested spaces . Interactive storytelling and memory building in post-conflict society . Interactive textiles . Tracking emotions . Posthumanism: New technologies and creative strategies . Positionings: local and global transactions . Transformative creativity - participatory practices . Entertainment and Mobility Citizenship and contested spaces: Over the past decades international mobility, forced and voluntary migration has changed the social fabric of many societies. Alongside a growing ethnic and cultural diversity within countries, the nation state as discrete, bounded entity is itself increasingly being eroded under the influence of global capital and digitisation. This theme invites contributions that explore and challenge established and common sense notions of citizenship and interconnected value hierarchies particularly in politically, socially and culturally contested contexts. It aims to encourage debates on alternatives to the hegemonic model of democracy, and seeks alternative visions and creative strategies for citizen practices in contested spaces based on the (perceived) potential of digital technologies. Interactive Storytelling and Memory building in post-conflict society Invited are innovative and advanced strategies of constructing inter/ active through collaborative and participatory practices that build on, mobilising and explore the long tradition of oral story telling. Of interest are how stories operate in the formation of memories within post-conflict (but still conflicted) society individually and collectively, and what potential they may have to offer in conflict transformation and identity re/formation. Considerations of aesthetic and ethical concerns both within the narrative domain as well as in the technological realisation and dissemination / distribution are welcome too. Interactive Textiles The theme invites contributions related to creative and technical production and application processes that challenge conventional methods of working with textiles and their perceived material properties. It aims to give consideration to innovative ways to produce textiles that are capable to carry autonomous wireless sensor networks and wearable computing, integrating sensors into pervasive communication systems as front-end information gatherers. What kind of 'second skins or middle ware can be created that is capable to support true 'context aware' networks connecting between digital and molecular worlds, What applications can be realised in the area of performance measurements in the medical and sports sectors, or in the innovation of mobile and personalised communication systems? Where are the hardware and software challenges, the ethical concerns and activist potentials? Positionings: local and global transactions The theme takes its point of departure the processes through which spaces are being constructed, re-mapped and negotiated in the contemporary situation of global capital, digitisation and migration. Issues of space are highly pertinent in terms of its constitution, perception, appropriation, consumption. These issues cannot be divorced from a scrutiny of the social, political, cultural and medial conditions under which spaces are being produced, trans/formed, and re/presented. Of particular interest are new and convergent models of space and spatial dynamics, and thus of reality construction, whether real, virtual or augmented, and the challenges they pose to the relationship between local(ised) and global(ised) transactions in the cultural domain and the re/formation and re/presentation of identities connected to them. Transformative Creativity - Participatory Practices The theme highlights the operations and limitations of conventional (post-modernist) aesthetic models and cultural representation in relation to the clash of different ideological perspectives, vested interests and authority, whether they concern outright economic interests, political power or the relationship between different domains of knowledge production like art and science, or authorship and expertise, production and consumption. Contributions are invited that challenge established templates of creative practice and audio-visual / multimedia re/presentations and their associated hierarchies of value, modes of understanding and agency in society. This strands focuses on the prototyping and probing of innovative ways of dialogic exchange, of collaborative and participatory creative engagement across the domains of creative practice and the 'production of theory and reflection'. Proposals are thought that reconsider the transformative potential of creativity in society and scrutinise the role of and relationship between artist and collaborators/participants through the use of digital technologies and the development of innovative/alternative circuits of distribution, debate and social and political inter/action. Tracking emotions The theme invites contributions related to emotions. It aims to give consideration to innovative ways to scan, model, simulate, stimulate, reproduce and trigger emotions. The theme takes its point of departure the human emotions utilized in different creative processes. Where and how can artists and researchers utilize new technologies to find about spectators' - users' emotions? How do we trigger, research, teach, and organize, emotions? Emotions are extremely complex but with the new technologies we are for the first time able to quantify and scan them. How do we differentiate in different emotional experiences? How artists make certain that artworks trigger wishful emotions? Of particular interest are new scanning technologies, different emotional models -whether describe emotions and related processes or use emotions or metaphors based on emotions to describe different processes and new art forms where spectators emotions are used for interactivity or reshape of the artworks. Posthumanisms: New Technologies & Creative Strategies Posthumanism operates at the interface of transhumanism and cyborgology, drawing attention to the convergent spaces of biology and artifice. Its manifestation through a range of biopolitical events, along with an aesthetic staging of bioethical encounters ruptures the polarized views of bioconservatism and technoprogressivism, provoking a series of conflicts that demand multi-layered conceptual apparatus to unravel. The sensory habitus of posthuman prostheses initiates the re-staging of design principles to anticipate the demand for new sensory experiences, technologies, services. This theme explores and expands our understanding of how innovative hardware and technologies are constituted by shifts of new art and design forms and how modes of sensory experience alter arts. For example, what kind of experience is generated through imaginations of posthumanity in different art and design forms? What do viewers expect from artists in terms of adopting posthuman technologies and modes of sensory delivery? How do we prepare and critically engage new generations of artists, designers and consumers through these technologies? Entertainment and Mobility Theme seeks to identify the development of entertainment and mobile media toward arts and to understand how gaming and mobile expressions, technologies, products, services and media can shape new art forms and reshape existing art forms. Areas of possible presentation include, but are not limited to, the following: · Uses of mobile technologies in arts. · Uses of gaming in arts. · New gaming technologies · New mobile technologies · Cataloging and archiving mobile artifacts · Mobile and gaming experimenting. · New art forms utilizing mobile technologies · Mobile technologies and the delivery of art and culture experiences, services and resources · Usability · Mobile collaborating CALL FOR WORKSHOPS, ROUNDTABLES/PANELS/FORUMS/TUTORIALS AND OPEN SPACES Proposals are sought for ISEA 2009 that will illuminate both the near and long term future of Digital Media Culture. Submissions are encouraged from any creative, professional, or scholarly field that relates to communications, art/design, cultural expression, practice and aesthetics, and the technical means by which they are enabled. CALL FOR ART PROJECTS, WORKS, INTERVENTIONS AND INITIATIVES ISEA 2009 invites artists, creators and researchers to submit their works. Submissions are encouraged from any relevant creative and professional field. Artists, early career scholars and PhD students are particularly encouraged to submit. REVIEW PROCESS All paper and project proposal will be double blind peer reviewed by an international panel and published in the proceedings. Other, more substantial publishing opportunities may arise in due course. Fields of inquiry and practice: ISEA 2009 accepts submissions from following fields of inquiry and practice: electronic art, cultural activism, socially and politically engaged practices, mobile environments, locative media, GIS, interactive and nonlinear storytelling, electronic fiction, hypertext, interactive television and cinema, multimedia, new media, streaming media, cinema and video, video art, video installation, interactive and networked performance, digital aesthetics, theory, history, computer games, games culture, games system design, games theory, bio-art, nano-art, sound, electronic music, interactive architecture, MOOs, MUDs, RPG, augmented reality, virtual reality, virtual worlds, SUBMISSION For all proposals please submit a max. of 500 word abstract / proposal (with images where appropriate). Go to www.isea2009.org for further detailed information on symposium sub-themes, broader ISEA2009 activities and information on how to submit your paper/project proposal. DEADLINE FOR SESSIONS PAPERS AND PROJECTS - 15 SEPTEMBER 2008