This is very good!  I'm always very open to discussion or correction on
any or all points.  I do like to take a point from which to create
discussion, though, and I think that this is the important part.
*******************************

 Thanks for replying to my question at ISEA !! ( my other question 
was "does ISEA have a body ".)
            **************************************************


            I'll think about that next.
 
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that it is so great that we now have many major symposia organised 
by people in our professions
 
            *************************************************
            Very true.
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It is really good also seeing the REFRESH to REPLACE to ..where next ? 
(Has a group proposed to hold the third conference two years after
Berlin ?)
building to create a place for discussion of the histories of all this
stuff. The
initial idea for REFRESH was hatched between Oliver Grau, Sara Diamond 
and myself in a restaurant during ISEA in Japan. ISEA at least is a
crossing
place.
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Also agreed.
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So the good news is that we are now victims of our success= the 
art and computer community now has dozens of venues a year and 
every university is trying to put itself on the map, with varying levels
of vitality....and art using computers no longer defines a field of
practice
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I doubt that I can agree with your statement 

""""That is, while the best 
scholars seem to be creating work of increasing density (and some, 
acuity), they are becoming increasingly divorced from the public,""""

I dont know when this golden age existed when intellectuals
were not divorced from the public !!! (ask Socrates or Galileo) 


I stand very much corrected, and perhaps that I may say that at this
time, global culture could stand to benefit more than in perhaps the
last thirty to fifty years from public scholarship, due to the
contemporary mass culture.  This I do feel very strongly about.


But more seriously it is clear that critical discussion is evolving
in a new landscape and that there are many avenues for developing
serious discussions of new work, and new ideas and that the universities

do not have any monopoly on this= nor did they ever
**************************************
However (and you cite Ippolito after this) institutions and academic
legitimacy do have priority and hegemonic power that give them a
distinct advantage.  This was supposed to be challenged by the rise of
the Internet (or at least the popular intellectual atmosphere of the
mid-90's suggested this).  Perhaps we are merely at a point where there
is an impulse for a reiteration of Beuys and Higgins, and the Free
Univerity. 
**************************************

I am interested in jon ippolitos discussion started during REPLACE
about how one could develop "reputation metrics" like everyone i 
spend a couple of hours a day on blogs, lists but it is damn hard to 
find one's way to the interesting discussions ( thanks crumb)- 
during the internet bubble i worked with mark beam and the straddle3
in Barcelona group to try and develop a tracking system that would sniff
out new ideas 
that were developing traction ( or sinking from view) sort of like a
stock
market of ideas and people..there are a number of systems that do that
now
probably better than peer review of abstracts submitted to a conference 
****************************************
            The great thing is that these discussions ARE getting into
the system.  For example, for my tenure process, at least for the first
year, my committee is considering Ippolito's recommendations for
electronic accreditation towards tenure. There are a few more, but it
proves that there is much needed discussion.
 
************************************************************* 

Universities have one advantage..they move slowly into new fields, but
once
there they move out slowly...at least in places that still have the
concept
of tenure..so no doubt a hundred years from now we will be attacking 
the web art departments as being ossified and resisting integrated the
new art forms of the 22nd century
****************************************
That would be most ironic.
****************************************
 

so i guess i think the real response to patrick's angst is that a new
ecology of places to discuss interesting topics is developing..ISEA may 
be an idea whose time is passed...but there is a whole network of events
out there of different scales and in different cultures working at the
problems=
and indeed the situation is different when we didnt have globalised
interconnection 
and such rapid flow of ideas and work= the university is the wrong place
to
look for a rapid response to a changing world

****************************************
Thanks for the response, and I hope that my polemic is not really
considered as angst, as it is merely a polemic designed to create a
dialectic from which a conversation can be had.  My actual position is
far less extreme than my comments here, but are meant to be a 'call to
action', more or less.  We live in an age in which criticism is often
considered as dissent, which I feel is very unfortunate, as one form of
learning only comes through the understanding of difference.  From sand
comes pearls, and that's what I'm trying to get at.
 
As for the university and other institutions, of which I am now a part,
I wish to not see those structures trying to colonize the intellectual
milieu that was originally considered as being flat and rhizomatic,
including many levels of expertise and experience, and not reinscribing
the traditional boundaries of legitimation and hegemony to new forms.
This may or may not happen. The real issue here is that there is the
possibility that with the success you mention, the job of establishing
this discursive field may be accomplished, and it may be time for the
avant- to move on.  The problem is that I have lived in this field for
so long, it may be difficult to see what is 'next'; but I am sure that
will come.   
 

i guess one of my concerns that was behing my "does ISEA have a body"
question is that so much of the new media work seems to be divorced from
areas of societal turmoil..its strange how the ecological art community
is
so separate from the new media community

there is a group in Brazil working on a new art and technology center
called 
in english "the Human Project" ... so how does all this new media work
and discussion contribute to the "human project" ( and yes does the ISEA
body belong in it)


 
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            This is a great question.  First, I deeply apologize if my
comments are seen more for the negative than the positive, as I feel
that Refresh! was an important moment in time, and will define much fo
media art historical discourse in the coming years - period.  
 
            At this time< i think it has 'some' body, but not much of
one.  At the last three events (the Helsinki one I looked at materials)
I saw only a few items that were getting into that issue - i.e. the
Human Project.  But furthermore, I would like to see it broadened to the
Global Project, in that the long -term prospects for humanity seem dire
from all the information that I have.
 
            And when you consider the further abstraction through
network culture, such as Second Life (which has an avatar carbon
footprint nearly equal to that of a US citizen), I think that this
conversation should be provoked in some way.  
 
            I guess I will need a couple months to mull this one over as
well.  The question may be what role does technological art/sci inquiry
have to do with the Human/Global project, and how we can address these
issues.
 
            Excellent.  Thanks for the thoughtful response.