(2014) Performing the web: negotiating affect and online aesthetics. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture. (original) (raw)
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Performing the web: negotiating affect and online aesthetics
Journal of AESTHETICS & CULTURE, 2014
On October 1, 2011, following its public debut at a gallery in Toronto, the Sandbox Project made its appearance online, timidly emerging from the bursting folds of the popular Wordpress Content Management System (CMS). The Sandbox Project is an itinerant community art and activism laboratory consisting of a series of live events and a complementary online platform, both conceived as a collaborative effort of countless individuals. The project explores ways in which respectful and anti-oppressive processes of collaboration, the formation of alliances, and new lines of solidarity may occur between activists and artists working with different media and creative tactics. Now in its third year of existence, the website combines different CMS formats to experiment with new forms of online interaction and to respond to the diversity of interventions featured during the live events. Rather than functioning as a space that simply records and documents each event, the website took it upon itself to play with the live events (the laboratory) dynamically: it sought to give the visitor a sense of the vibrant atmosphere that the participants had been experiencing during live events, in order to elicit further online interactions and initiatives among past and current participants. The website and the live events aspired to complete each other, to become together one continuous and contiguous performance. But to what extent can the vibrancy of human behavior be played and conveyed online? This paper critically reflects on the difficulties in incorporating the project into today's manifold, yet homogeneous and homogenizing, online publishing options. In acknowledging this difficult process of mediation, it urges to reflect on the material and conceptual complications emerging from the involvement of diverse and far-apart communities and individuals. Roberta Buiani is a scholar in media and cultural studies, a curator and media artist based in Toronto. She received her PhD from the programme in Communication and Culture at York University (Toronto). She teaches in the Communication Studies Department of the same university. She is co-founder of the ArtSci Salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (University of Toronto, http://artscisalon.wordpress.com) and program advisor for the Subtle Technologies Festival. Her work balances theoretical and applied research at the intersection of science, technology and creative resistance, and converges on the analysis of techno-scientific ecologies. An itinerant community project, ''The Sandbox Project'' (http:// sandbox-prj.org) challenges concepts of sustainability and oppression in face-to-face and online collaborations, in network and social media configurations. More information about her artistic and scholarly work can be found at http://www.atomarborea.net This article was possible thanks to continuous dialogue with colleague Alessandra Renzi, and a fruitful discussion with Jody Berland and
Fusing the (Supposedly) Opposite: A Review of the Live Streams Exhibition
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This review essay analyses the Live Streams exhibition (held at Art Exchange from 28th of April until 27th of May) by highlighting the underlying challenge to binary thinking that is prominent to the exhibition as a whole. This disregard to binarism creates a space of interaction between elements that we came to think of as antithetical: culture/nature, science/art, online/offline, fact/metaphor, individual/collective, etc. A deeper analysis of some of the artworks will reveal how the artists fuse these (supposedly) separate components, resulting in works that take on an interdisciplinary shape. Another important point of analysis are the exhibition-related events. During the course of the pandemic, the virtual world has become the predominant space for all types of social gatherings. For curators, this transition from the familiar gallery spaces to the sterile environments of the World Wide Web creates certain nuances which force them to adapt their exhibitions accordingly. entre—r...
Staging live events: converging experience design and live art
Every design approach is a process of setting the context for experiences to occur. Experience design, in particular, embraces a holistic approach on the content and context wherein human experiences and events emerge. Live art share common ground with experience design in studying and staging live events, on the borderline between artistic and everyday experience, performance stage and experiential space, spectator and creator, looking and participating, participant and artwork. Essentially, experience design projects and live art events induce and embrace audience engagement and participation in live embodied encounters, combining scenario-based patterns with action that unfolds on the fly. In this paper, the common ground between experience design and live art in organizing live events is analyzed by studying the common features of experience design projects and live art events, and applying performance perspective and methods in the design thought and practice. As live events as organic structure is never stable but always evolving, moulded out of people’s presence and, design strategies surpass old approaches to include points of engagement and strings of participation among people and (physical and mixed-reality, social and cultural, public and scenic) environment. Designers and scholars have discerned the advantages of applying performance aspects in the design process to enrich designers’ imagination and creativity due to their interactive and experiential character, to help them empathise with people their work is addressed to, and finally to assist designers communicate their ideas with colleagues and potential clients/users/audiences as well.
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A great many Central and Eastern Europeans were among the laborers who immigrated to work in Cape Breton mines and steel mills in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite their continuing contribution to the region, Cape Bretoners of Eastern and Central European descent have been overshadowed in public memory and scholarship by the island’s more familiar Scottish and Acadian communities. This article addresses a project through which an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars living locally in Cape Breton and abroad, as well as numerous local community partners, aimed address this lacuna. The participants’ concrete objective was the production of a web portal – diversitycapebreton.ca – that opens up onto reams of curated digital material. These digital media complement the project’s program of public outreach. This article focuses on ways in which this digital curation project served (and continues to serve) as a space for the continual collaborative re-creation of c... _____ Bon nombre d’immigrants venus travailler dans les mines et les aciéries de l’île du Cap-Breton au XIXe et au début du XXe siècles venaient de l’Europe Centrale et de l’Est. Cependant, malgré leur contribution continue à la région, les habitants du Cap-Breton d’ascendance européenne centrale et orientale ont été éclipsés, dans la mémoire et le savoir officiels de l’île, par les communautés écossaises et acadiennes plus familières. Cet article porte sur un projet ayant rassemblé un groupe international et interdisciplinaire de chercheurs vivant au Cap-Breton et à l’étranger, ainsi que de nombreux partenaires des communautés locales, dans le but de combler cette lacune. Les participants avaient pour objectif concret la création d’un portail Internet – diversitycapebreton.ca – ouvrant sur des sphères de matériel muséal numérique, celles-ci venant s’ajouter à un programme de diffusion auprès du grand public. Cet article aborde la façon dont ce projet de conservation numérique a servi (et continue de servir) d’espace collaboratif de re-création continue de communautés et d’histoires.
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Online participatory media holds the promise of activating otherwise passive audiences by providing spaces that encourage creative collaboration among diverse participants. The thesis traces the history of participation in artistic movements and early networked communication to contextualize a series of projects at the intersection of performance and participation online. Projects include WikiPhone, in which multiple participants collaborate on soundtracks in real-time, modifying existing online videos; OpenBrand, a system that allows participants to rewrite advertisements; Emma On Relationships, a video blog inviting participants to call in for love advice; and several other projects, exploring aspects of creativity and collaboration. Commonalities within these systems are examined in order to define design principles governing the creation of participatory media, and to explore the potential of these systems to effect social and political change. THESIS SUPERVISOR John Maeda Assoc...
Defining cyberformance as an emergent kind of art is the object of this paper. Cyberformance is developed through the Internet using digital technologies, like the computer, a narrower category than digital performance, that is defined for taking place through any digital means. Cyberformance happens live, in cyberspace-be it in a chat room or a MUVE (Multi User Virtual Environment)-and its performers and audience are distributed physically, sometimes around the globe, developing a form of telepresence. It is risky, deals with post-modern subjects and it is liminal in its experimentation. Cyberformance uses different sources but is mainly dependent on the computer and tends to never be finished and, so, to be an open work in Humberto Eco's (1962) sense. To define it, we work within a hybrid paradigm of theatre and performance happening in cyberspace. Certain cases-from performance using mainly text to performance using wearables and game consoles-and some ongoing projects will be evoked, notably the ones by the author of the term cyberformance, Helen Varley Jamieson as well as Cochrane and Valverde's Senses Places, a mixed reality performance using Second Life, with which the researcher has been collaborating. These experiments at the verge of the physical or actual world and the virtual one go beyond the purposes of art, creating new tools for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and promising new and more corporeal ways of distributed communication. This article is, in part, a result of the research for the author's PhD thesis: «Cyberformance: performance in virtual worlds» (2013). 2. Defining cyberformance Cyberformance is live performance art that happens in virtual worlds and ambiences. The designation cyberformance was created by Helen Varley Jamieson putting together the terms cybernetics and performance. In her Master of Arts thesis Adventures in Cyberformance (2008), this performer, with experience in theatre, net art, software development and digital performance, defined some of the characteristics of this form of art from which my theoretical framework departed. In my Ph.D. thesis «Cyberformance: performance in virtual worlds» (2013), I extended and updated the concept for this emerging art, found its genealogy and identified and analysed three main forms through
"Digital Art Live: Exploring the Aesthetics of Interactivity"
While technologies and theories of interactive media have developed exponentially over the past twenty five years, an aesthetics of interactivity, as a philosophy of perception and validation of interactivity as a form of art, has been slower to emerge. While aesthetic inquiry has expanded to investigate the sensuous perception of many forms of electronic art, interactivity as an expressive medium, challenges many fundamental assumptions of traditional aesthetics This paper addresses the performative aesthetics of interactivity through a consideration of a programme of interactive art works presented through the Digital Art Live (DAL) project in Auckland. The DAL initiative is New Zealand’s only specialised, ongoing, interactive art programme. It has engaged both public and private entities, artists, developers, community organizations, staff and students from three universities. The location of the DAL screen in a performing arts complex introduces some new perspectives into the emerging discourse about interaction, aesthetics and creative practices. Nine DAL projects are considered in relation to issues raised in Simon Penny’s critical interrogation of the performative aesthetics of interactivity (2010) and literature on contemporary aesthetics. Key issues including the importance of aesthetic inquiry; the notion of performativity as meaningful, embodied practice; object/veiwer spatial relationships; synesthetics and the interdisciplinarity of interactve art; and the relationship between representation and interaction are adressed as part of ongoing research into interactive art that is being conducted through the DAL project.
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There is a growing interest amongst both artists and curators in designing art works which create new forms of visual communication and enhance interaction in museums and galleries. Despite extraordinary advances in the analysis of talk and discourse, there is relatively little research concerned with conduct and collaboration with and around aesthetic objects and artefacts, and to some extent, the social and cognitive sciences have paid less attention to the ways in which conduct -both visual and vocal -is inextricably embedded within the immediate ecology, the material realities at hand. In this article, we examine how people in and through interaction with others, explore, examine and experience a mixed-media installation. Whilst primarily concerned with interaction with and around an art work, the article is concerned with the ways in which people, in interaction with each other (both those they are with and others who happen to be in the same space), reflexively constitute the sense and significance of objects and artefacts, and the ways in which those material features reflexively inform the production and intelligibility of conduct and interaction.