One conclusion was that networks are fundamentally about knowledge that is relevant for its participants, including an understanding of different “nodes” in the network. From the perspective of media labs and residencies, it was discussed how we should work more effectively amongst different labs to boost research, and share and support different projects in residence. This is probably done best through rather close-knit networks, not loose and horizontal ones.

As networks have been largely based on meetings and mailing lists, as addressed by Armin Medosch during his skype talk, how to better build continuity rather than short-termism? We are cluttered with e-mail as it is, so new networks is not the answer, but rather, evolved ones. As a solution to difficulty in finding a shared common denominator to a network, I suggested to consider an open channel, where networks are formed according to keyword preferences that may change and evolve over time. Kind of metadata mon amour mesh, where both messages and individuals are matched through tagging. I think there is no other solution in fact to the overflow of contacts and messages, than rather seeing networks through temporaneity and selection, moderated openness and selective closedness (or maybe vice versa).

http://orgnet.rixc.lv/

Also part of the exhibition, CDPDU – Common Data Processing and Display Unit (M.A.R.I.N. Alpha) is a data display and processing architecture built to open hardware and software standards, combining different satellite and sensor data feeds on marine ecology. The CDPDU will serve as one of the public faces of the M.A.R.I.N. project, and the API (Arctic Perspective Initiative, http://arcticperspective.org). The CDPDU is co-designed by Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman (USA/CA) in collaboration with PACT systems and University of California Santa Barbara, Media Arts and Technology Program, and several individuals and supporters (see http://marin.cc/cdpdu for more details).

For more information on the residency and its projects, please see http://marin.cc.

Rhetoric of open and free in the context of software and networks have become, besides being also sites of useful and creative practices, idealized dogmas. In networked communication in general, as well as in new media art and content creation, we will increasingly need a sense and sensibility of combining open and closed as tactics, rather than as ideals. In my walled garden, there are many gates with different protocols for entering and leaving. Also its walls are porous. Visiting my garden proper will require a keyword combination, or being part of a social network assemblage. There are waiting rooms, and a huge compost for spam. I eagerly look forward to life beyond e-mail.

I co-hosted a workshop with Adam Somlai Fischer from Kitchen Budapest on the topic of Social & Semantic Serendipity: Crafting networked environments for new media arts and culture.It was  an autopsy of contemporary communication & publishing media environment in order to open up a discussion of what could be done, in practice, to improve the communication intense, spam infested, and highly unsustainable lives of new media practitioners and organizations. We intended to raise conceptual and contextual autopsy debate while drafting modular synthesis of a social & semantic software that could be crafted. But rather than being pragmatic only, we insisted on raising an approach, that of serendipity, to distinguish also the communication and software design practice from that of the functional mainstream.

The dialogic outcome was a kind of a mind mapping exercise done on PREZI, a great slideshow + mindmapping software Adam has created with colleagues from Kibu. Please see the presentation on-line here. Walled Garden publication will come out in May – an essay of mine will be in it.

Adam interviewed on video by Network Cultures during Walled Garden.

Tapio interviewed at Walled Garden.

The Marine working session looked at marine ecosystems, art and science collaborations and new designs for sustainable technology for the seas. I myself presented the M.A.R.I.N. network and art & science residency concepts, Toshiroh Ikegami shared examples of marine and land based biospheres, Andreas Siagian talked about art and science and workshop practices by HONF (House of Natural Fiber), and Oleg Koefoed discussed  plans for a boat project, to be based from Denmark and to address climate change.

The ASEF event gathered 43 Asian and European artists, designers, architects, cultural practitioners, environmentalists and scientists, who participated in a three-day workshop, organised in partnership with the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, the China Academy of Social Sciences and the Danish Cultural Institute. A second project phase will follow which will lead to an event held in Copenhagen in December 2009 alongside the Climate Change Summit. A report of the event can be found from here as a PDF.

Marine and littoral biospheres

Toshiroh Ikegami, Sea Farm projecct.

An eco-designer based in Osaka, Japan, Toshiroh Ikegami works with sustainability of seaside cities. He aims to create designs that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while demonstrating the vast possibilities design has to offer for the revitalisation of cities.

His Sea Farm project focuses on experimental equipment installation concentrating on the recovery of living organisms in the Osaka Bay. Sea Farm will create a suitable surrounding for marine life forms that would no longer be able to cope with the water in the Osaka bay. Further, development ot phytoplankton and algalg reproduction aids in the absorption of carbon dioxide by photosynthesis. The project has been proposed for Tokyo Bay area.

The Seaside Farm project is an experimental greenhouse at Seafront, utilizing solar energy, desalination of seawater for plant irrigation, and an architecture optimal for carbon binding – and growing plants.  Hopefully we will be able to set up a collaboration with Toshirah in the coming years.

Global Village – education and  ecology

Global Village farming + branding

China produces 70 percent of its energy on coal – and India’s figures are not far from it. If these two population and industry giants, as well as US, would reach carbon neutralilty, there really could be chance for earthly survival. During Dialogue on Art and Climate Change we visited a local ecology educational initiative called  Global Village Yan Qing. A bit outside of the busy Beijing, in the midst of  green hills and corn fields, the place was idyllic. During  a retreat like walk into the hills, each participant was left to meditate with surrounding nature before convening for lunch. The site at which we ate was once a thriving river, now only a trickle of water remained. Water may very well be the oil of coming decades. Yet amidst this comfortable feeling it was easy to forget the bigger eco-picture and focus on grass roots dialogue and thinking of initiatives that could make sense in Beijing context. Global Village educates into recycling, energy saving light bulbs, public transport, and the like.

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.

A project by Shiho Fukuhara, Georg Tremmel and Yousuke Nagao, Sourcing Water, played with the idea of divination and mapped Singapore's water resources as an imaginary urban art project.

The conference of ISEA 2008 was high quality within the sessions, but the level of keynotes was perhaps more so a reflection of Singaporean funding and partnerships than high critical academic standards. I thought before the event that if there is no conflict what so ever between art works presented at ISEA and the Singaporean government, there is a reason to be concerned of the political and critical content of the work. As far as I know, no conflicts occurred. Despite the sharpest and most critical work perhaps missing or being not so visible, the over all feeling was that ISEA2008 was 4-0 betterr than the “Zero One Adobe ISEA” in San Jose.

I presented “Technologies of Location” paper in a session, which I  also moderated. Feedback was good, and I also made a few new contacts relevant to my research on location based media. I also participated to the ASEF + IFACCA mini-summit on new media arts practice and policy, Leonardo Educational Forum as a moderator, Luminous Green and Futuresonic Urban Climate Camp workshops as a co-moderator and in addition moderated one more conference session. It was an incredibly busy and productive time, and I did meet many people whom I will keep in contact in the years to come.

The event in Singapore brought together 54 artists, researchers and policy makers from 26 countries. What was quite different between this mini-summit and the Helsinki one was that local policy was not on the agenda: Singaporean policy is much more about policing than about support for independent and let alone critical cultural practices. Representation of local policy bodies was formally there on the first day of the event but no actual dialogue took place about the local policy. Two local practitioners were luckily present to share views on what’s going on – and what it may mean to “represent” international collaboration in Singapore… in other words, does one passively accept the local policy?

Konrad Becker, participant to the summit, in front of Wipo next to ASEF office in Singapore.

There were good workshop discussions and lively dialogue, and also new connections made between the participants. I particularly enjoyed the session that looked at research and media arts policy. Some of these discussions were taken up also later during the Leonardo Educational Forum (LEF) meeting, hosted by Nina Czegledy, where I co-hosted a session with Maja Kuzmanovic. At the same time as discussions were fruitful, I found that many participants had not much experience in dealing with the inter-relationshiop of practice and policy. Thus the event mostly was a mapping of practice in its various formats, and what might policy mean in each given region. This all was good and interesting, but in order to push forward policy questions that would be implemented either in national frameworks or to start collaboration between policy bodies to make changes in how the new media arts are supported, there was less focus and momentum. Rather, issues raised since 1997 P2P meeting in Amsterdam published in the Amsterdam Agenda, and results from the Helsinki mini-summit as Helsinki Agenda, and arguments from Delhi Declaration developed from a meeting in 2005 at Sarai were re-iterated.

After the event Recommendations  developed from the Mini Summit on New Media Arts  Policy & Practice were written by Awadhendra Sharan and myself with editorial support from Annette Wolfsberger. Unfortunately Rob van Kranenbourg did not participate in writing this, instead, he withdrew from the process, but remained as an author of the final report. So we were left with the balancing acts of how to deal with the non-presence of the local context for policy in Singapore, and the diversity of agendas presented by the participants to the mini-summit. So whether to do a good policy document, or to aim at never possible representative text of the event as a whole? I guess the end result is a compromise between the two. I am glad it got done, but the process was far too laborsome, as its’ design should have been there from the beginning of the event design to the end.

The report + recommendations can be downloaded as a PDF-file.
Helsinki mini-summit ARSIS magazine can be downloaded as a PDF-file.
Delhi Declaration of a New Context for a New Media at deBalie Dossiers.
Amsterdam Agenda archived at V2_Archive.