Curated and produced by Emma Ota, Dislocate is an annual seminar and exhibition addressing locality, arts and technology. I took part in its 2008 edition, and its seminar on “Construction of Place”. Having already addressed relationshiop of location based media arts practices with social networks, I further argued in my presentation for a viewpoint that perhaps the social interaction defines the work, and relationhip with place, rather than a more direct, mimetic sense of “place” to be aquired through an lbm project. Both Proboscis and Blast Theory presented at this event, and the more I listened, the more convinced I became about the importance of social contact vis a vis relationshiop of place. Not that this is a new idea, but perhaps there is something in “placing” that on top, as a decisive plane of experience rather than how one perceives a physical architecture or a narrative history of a given location.
Lushan Liu performed with an outfit full of QR tags. By scanning one and uploading to a local service, you would get a poetic, narrative response.
At ICC, there was an opening of Young Korean and Japanese media artists. Machikio Kusahara has addresssed so called “device art”; I found this exhibition to have similar tendencies, with a focus on “visual consumables”… they are not necessarily devices, as they do not function in any deviceful way. They are just part of object - consumer culture, reassembled in ways that invite the user for a smile, an exprience of a new arrangement. But beyond that, most of the work, though produced extremely well, did not open up as contoversial or remarkably challenging.
Dislocate took place at a community arts center in Yokohama called ZAIM. Yokohama itself has worked a lot to gentrify different parts of town with art and design. This was evident with the Bienniale that was on simultaneously.
Helsinki, Montreal, Rotterdam, Chicago, Liverpool/Manchester, Paris, Nagoya, Helsinki, San Jose, Singapore - this was my 10th participation to the International Symposium on Electronic Arts. I was quite busy during the event, presented twice, moderated thrice. What is great about ISEAs is that since they happen in different locations, there are always new people and organisations to meet. Some of which will lead to long term collaborations, sometimes friendship. This edition of ISEA was chaired by Gunalan Nadarajan, who used to teach & run the research programme at La Salle, an art college with a brand new flashy building as one of the event venues. The production was done very well, yet to a degree without risks.