http://www.isea-web.org


CALL FOR PAPERS, ART WORKS, WORKSHOPS, ROUNDTABLES

ISEA 2009 - 15th International Symposium on
Electronic Art 
and Exhibition 2009

Hosted by the University of Ulster 
In association with 
Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology

Waterfront Hall, Belfast
with hubs at Coleraine, Derry, Dublin

23rd August - 1st September 2009, Northern Ireland
http://www.isea2009.org

What is ISEA2009 Symposium?
The Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international non-profit
organisation that promotes the relationship between arts, science and
digital technologies. Since 1988 ISEA has overseen a major International
Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA) taking place in various prestigious
institutions across the globe biannually, and moving to an annual cycle
following ISEA2009.

ISEA2009 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 sought 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
professional, craft 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
artists and researchers can 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. So
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 shift 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: 
Using of mobile technologies in arts.
Using 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. 


DEADLINE FOR SESSIONS PAPERS AND PROJECTS - 15 SEPTEMBER 2008
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.

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 professional, craft 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 ARTWORKS AND INITIATIVES
ISEA 2009 invites artists, creators and researchers to submit their works.
Submissions are encouraged from any art, craft or 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,

DATES FOR SUBMISSION
Dates for the submission of 500 word abstracts/proposals: 15th of September
2008 to [log in to unmask]


Dr.Cahal McLaughlin
Senior Lecturer
School of Media, Film and Journalism
University of Ulster
Coleraine
Cromore Road
BT52 1SA
00 44 (0)28703 24018