Tuesday, March 31, 2015
School of Art, Design & Media (ADM) Lobby, Main Floor + Adobe Connect Online
(+ you can download the Symposium Program pdf)
6:00 PM – 6:30 PM SGT
Welcoming Remarks from Singapore: Symposium co-chairs, Randall Packer & Vibeke Sorensen
Welcoming Remarks from London: Furtherfield co-directors, Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett
6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Onsite Reception: Food & drinks served in the ADM Lobby with a networked installation by Juan Camilo González
@ Home With Furtherfield: Online attendees join Furtherfield co-directors Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett for an intimate telematic gathering of Internet artist interviews & conversation with: Nick Briz, Joseph Chiocchi, Helen Varley Jamieson, Maxime Marion, Juergen Trautwein, Joana Moll
Live data visualization installation: new work by Juan Camilo González
Viewable in the ADM Lobby and on the project Website
La Eterna is a data visualization and animated fictionalization of participants’ location and communication data. Eterna is one and all, her appearance and behavior emerging from interactions from those who take part in the symposium, regardless of where they physically are on the network.
7:30 – 8:00 PM
Live Webcam Cyberformance: New work created by Helen Varley Jamieson, and performed with NTU students. Viewable in the ADM Library Screening Room, the ADM Main Lobby, and via Adobe Connect.
we r now[here] is a cyberformance about nowhere and somewhere: the “nowhere” of the Internet becomes “now” and “here” through our virtual presence. Approaching the virtual somewhere from a physical nowhere, we glimpse streets, public transport, corridors, doorways – physical representation of data packets and pixels on the move – until the audio-visual streams converge into a single “now-here” in the somewhere of the Internet.
Student performers: Huang Pei-Sheng (Frank), Quek Ming Jie (MJ), Ruzana Abdul Rahim, Tao Sheng (Tommy), Beverley Ng, Hannah Lerner, Mercik Bridget Tyler, Prakash Perumal Haridas, Eugene Soh, Ashley Lai, Sharanya Pillai, Diana Toh
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
HSS Conference Center (HSS-05-07),
School of Humanities & Social Sciences
+ Adobe Connect Online
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM SGT
Welcoming Remarks: Professor Alan K. L. Chan, Dean, College of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, NTU
Panel: “Distributed Teaching & Studio Models”
With the recent popularity of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Course) offered by educational institutions around the world, there has been a great deal of interest and critique regarding the effectiveness, practicality, and distribution of large-scale online classes. In this session, the presenters will describe their experience working with large and small models of remote teaching, strategies for building online community, engaging peer-to-peer interaction, and how distance education can drive the creation and distribution of knowledge in the arts and humanities in new ways.
Session Chair:
- Tim White, Professor & Associate Chair (Research), School of Material Science & Engineering, Nanyang Technological University
MOOCs in the Mainstream: How far have MOOCs progressed from popular vehicles of educational engagement to serious delivery of educational qualifications? The technology is here, but how should courses be packaged and who are the audiences?
Panelists:
- Anne Balsamo, Dean, School of Media Studies, New School for Public Engagement, New York
FemTechNet DOCC: Designing a Distributed Open Collaborative Course: In 2012, a network of feminist scholars created an alternative genre of MOOC called a DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) on the topic of “feminism and technology.” This presentation describes the work of feminist technocultural innovation with a focus on the creation of new collaborative online pedagogies and structures of distributed participation.
- Deborah Howes, Former Director of Digital Learning, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Understanding Space and Time in Online Teaching: In the emerging area of online teaching, how might art educators transform their practice from synchronous to asynchronous modes of teaching? The challenge then becomes how student engagement can be enhanced through the development of progressive pedagogies specific to the medium.
- David A. Ross, Chair, MFA Art Practice, School of the Visual Arts, New York
Rethinking Graduate Art Education for the Real World: Rather than artificially removing oneself from the “real world” for two years in order to pursue a traditional graduate art degree, participants in the School of Visual Arts (New York), MFA: Art Practice, engage in a low-residency experience. This rigorous online program creates a practical degree path for a community of working artists with minimal interruption of their day-to-day lives.
10:30 – 11:00 AM
Tea & Coffee Break
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Keynote: “Networked Performance Histories: Experiments in Cybernetic Existentialism”
- Steve Dixon, Artist & President, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore
This keynote explores the history of experimental networked performance and argues that many of these works specifically and importantly fuse ideas from cybernetics and existentialism. Key historical moments are traced, from the 19th century invention of the telegraph and telephone (“the Victorian Internet”) and the cybernetic arts of the 1960s, to Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s 1980 Hole in Space (“the mother of all video chats”), the desktop theatre improvisations and telematic dance works of the 1990s to the very latest online ‘cyberformances’ (including works by Dixon in collaboration with Paul Sermon). A range of ideas and theoretical perspectives are presented to demonstrate how cybernetic systems are used to articulate new expressions of the human existential condition, including through formulating new artistic manifestations of myth, the double, the spectre, alterity, space-time, extratemporality, the uncanny and the posthuman.
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Lunch
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Keynote: “XXX.SPANSIEV.NET/Z”
- jonCates, Chair and Associate Professor of Film, Video and New Media, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
jonCates delivers the keys to unlock an Art of the Networked Practice. He will perform answers to questions such as “can networks of meaning be Art?” by detailing his travels as an artist across the expansive / expressive networks of Dirty New Media and the Unstable Arts Now Known as Glitch Art. From 1917 to 2015, 98 years of nonlinear hystories will be interwoven / hyperlinked in XXX.SPANSIEV.NET/Z.
jonCates將使用XXX.SPANSIEV.NET/Z解開Art of the Networked Practice之鎖。從1917年至2015年，非直線性的98年多元歷史交錯穿插且超連結成：XXX.SPANSIEV.NET/Z。經由他細說身為一位經歷過澎湃遼闊的新污媒體、以及當前稱為『當機藝術』的不穩定藝術類藝術家，之如「意義的/網絡/的意義是否為藝術？」般的探索將由他的表演中獲得解答。
3:30 – 4:00 PM
Tea & Coffee Break
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Panel: “Peer-to-Peer Cultural Production”
This panel brings together the founders of two of the leading alternative art spaces in Europe: Furtherfield in London and the V2_Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, with game artist-hacker Anne-Marie Schleiner chairing the discussion. With large museums, small arts organizations, and individual artists initiating DIY and other socially-engaged forms of participatory activity, this discussion concerns the network’s potential as a medium for extending viewer participation and the creation of new models for peer-to-peer forms of cultural production.
Session Chair:
- Anne-Marie Schleiner, Artist & Instructor, Department of Communications & New Media, National University of Singapore
Creative Anonymity and Strange Web Peers: In the early phase of Web 1.0, netizens and online players collaborated in games and lists, often crafting bizarre and anarchistic identities distinct from their everyday selves. How do contemporary peer-to-peer, socially-engaged environments compare to those of the early Internet?
Panelists:
- Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, Co-founders & Co-directors, Furtherfield, London
Do It With Others (DIWO!): Since 1997 Furtherfield has brought people together in a social art hack of systems of domination and control. Artists, techies, activists and thinkers share dialogue and construct more imaginative art cultures than is possible in traditional art frameworks. From this emerges a practice where we reevaluate the contemporary version of the commons together on our own terms.
- Alex Adriaansens, Artistic Director and Co-founder, V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam
Practising Unstable Media Art: Over the last 20 years the impact of technically connecting everything with anything has been tremendous in understanding ourselves and the world, in which audience participation and co-creation have become areas for artistic research and production. This presentation looks at exemplary art and design productions developed at V2_ during a period when networks have emerged as essential in a changing dynamic of social, political, economic, and cultural relations.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
HSS Conference Center (HSS-05-07),
School of Humanities & Social Sciences
+ Adobe Connect Online
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM SGT
Welcoming Remarks: Professor Lee Sing Kong, Vice President, Education Strategies, NTU
Panel: “Collective Research”
In recent years, artists and theorists have explored the network as a medium for shared, distributed research. Online platforms including mailing lists, blogs, Websites, bulletin boards, etc. have been used to compile research and data for various forms of artworks and publications. This panel will examine strategies for collective research as practiced by new media practitioners, how “open source” forms of publishing coexist with and sometimes supersede more conventional approaches to research in the arts and in academia.
Session Chair:
- Juan Camilo González, Artist & PhD Candidate, School of Art, Design & Media, Nanyang Technological University
When Print is Not Enough: Currently we notice a rise in popularity of practice led research in the arts at the PhD level. One of the challenges working with rich media content is that the printed form only allows for part of the ideas to come through. This presentation offers an approach to web publishing a work-in-progress PhD dissertation, and how this might lead to the use of the network to collectively influence, inform, and expand the research process.
Panelists:
- McKenzie Wark, Professor, Culture and Media, New School for Liberal Arts, New York
The Silver Age of Social Media: Coming up with new collaborative practices is one of the hallmarks of the avant-garde. After briefly describing some of the historic movements such as the Constructivists, Surrealists, and Situationists, this presentation looks at the nettime.org mailing lists for networked cultures, a 90s formation representing a kind of “silver age” of social media that both prefigures but in some ways was more expansive than today’s formats.
- Charlotte Frost, Assistant Professor, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong
The Digital Academic: Going from PhD to Platform: Publishing books has long been considered the ultimate academic output, but what should today’s digital academic be authoring? In this panel I will talk about my own open, participatory, hybrid learning platforms as publishing alternatives, to define an academic practice that straddles formats, research and publishing, scholarship and service, as well as institutional and disciplinary boundaries.
- Melinda Rackham, Artist & Adjunct Professor, School of Media & Communication, RMIT University, Adelaide, Australia
SoftServe: DITO (doing it together online): Collaborative research engages, informs and enriches. However, in our era of shared economies, do networked communities step outside their own newly formed conventions to evaluate themselves? I will reference –empyre- forum’s history and several of its publishing outcomes, as well as my current collaborative writings, to reflect on potential entanglements.
10:30 – 11:00 AM
Tea & Coffee Break
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Keynote: “After the (digital) revolution: the role of the teacher and student in the networked environment”
- Peter Looker, Head, Teaching, Learning and Pedagogy Division, Nanyang Technological University
The digital revolution is dissolving traditional sources of authority in higher education: the authority of the institution over curriculum design and content, and the authority of the teacher as a preeminent focus of expertise. In the light of more decentred knowledge, these forms of authority look like unsustainable constructs. But universities have tended to respond to the digital revolution by integrating technology without necessarily understanding the implications for the role of the teacher and student. This presentation suggests that networked practice offers an opportunity to reconceptualise education (and the relationship between teacher and student) as a continuum of experiences that are at the edge of what is already known and understood. Networked practice provides an open potential for new connections, juxtapositions, and community. It is suggested that a new role for teachers might be to support students in evaluating their networked experiences and in giving accounts of their experience with emphasis on heightening a critical approach to practice.
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Lunch
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Virtual Roundtable Global Exchange: “Net Behaviors”
In the final session, we will host an open dialogue for all participants and attendees, local and remote. As a synthesis of ideas and aspirations raised throughout the symposium, as well as the month long NetArtizens Project, we will examine how today’s Net practitioners, or what we might refer to as “Netartizens,” are signaling a changing approach to artistic production, research, and teaching. In the age of social media, our conversations, discourses, and artistic work are “intertwingled” (to use Ted Nelson’s playful term) with exponentially exploding repositories of media and information: nowadays, our everyday communications are embedded with the metadata of search queries, hyperlinks, hashtags and usernames. To the extent that we practice, challenge, and assimilate the rapidly evolving systems and techniques of the network, we will examine and dissect the resulting impact on our individual and collective “Net behaviors.”
Moderator:
- Randall Packer, Visiting Associate Professor, School of Art, Design & Media, Nanyang Technological University
Commentators:
- Vibeke Sorensen, Chair, School of Art, Design & Media, Nanyang Technological University
- jonCates, Chair and Associate Professor of Film, Video and New Media, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett, Co-founders & Co-directors, Furtherfield, London
3:30 – 4:00 PM
Closing Remarks by Symposium Co-chairs Randall Packer and Vibeke Sorensen