[spectre] Digital Media and Digital Culture Seminar Series

Ned Rossiter n.rossiter at ulster.ac.uk
Tue Jun 29 18:19:55 CEST 2004


Digital Media and Digital Culture Seminar Series
Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster
Coleraine Campus, Northern Ireland

This seminar series is international in scope and collaborative in 
intention.  Leading researchers in the field of digital media and 
digital culture are invited to submit proposals to participate in the 
program.  Along with the presentation of papers, participants will 
also have the opportunity to run workshops with students and staff 
that explore database programming & aesthetics, network 
collaborations, new media education, project management, sustainable 
funding possibilities, open source movements and organised networks, 
to name a few of the interests that have arisen so far.

Along with live webcasting and documentation on the Centre's website 
(under construction), it is anticipated that all papers presented in 
the seminar series will be published in a working paper series 
currently being planned by Fibreculture Publications 
(http://www.fibreculture.org).  This working paper series will be 
published annually, and it will comprise an international digital 
media and digital culture research seminar.  In other words, the 
papers from the Centre for Media Research seminar will have an 
after-life in a larger, international and trans-institutional 
discussion on key issues in the field.  It is hoped the working paper 
series will lead to future collaborations between individuals and 
institutions.

All are very welcome to attend any of the presentations, including 
the external review on the 6 July, 2004.

For futher information, expressions of interest and inquiries, please contact:

Ned Rossiter
Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media)
Centre for Media Research
University of Ulster
Cromore Road
Coleraine
Northern Ireland
BT52 1SA

email: n.rossiter at ulster.ac.uk
tel.+44 (0)28 7032 3275


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Monday 5 July, 2004
3-4 pm, Venue: L116, South Building

Dr Esther Milne <EMilne at groupwise.swin.edu.au>
Media & Communications, Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia

Abstract

"That Curious Double Feeling: Fantasies of Presence in Email and 
Epistolary Practice"

In its representational systems and iconography and in the conceptual 
framework currently deployed to understand it, email communication is 
clearly indebted to epistolary culture.  Email's dominant metaphor is 
the post. However, the relation between email and the paper-based 
postal system has not been adequately explored.  In response, this 
paper reveals certain continuities between the two systems, arguing 
that a fantasy of presence pervades the socio-technological 
representations of email and epistolary practice.  How do 
geographically dispersed agents make themselves seem "present" to 
each other?  While corresponding by letter, postcard or email, 
readers construe an imaginary, incorporeal body for their 
correspondents that, in turn, reworks their interlocutor's 
self-presentation.  The fantasy of presence reveals a key paradox of 
cultural communication, namely that material signifiers can be used 
to produce the experience of incorporeal presence.  In order to map 
this fantasy historically, tropes of presence and intimacy are traced 
through three media sites: a "virtual community" of 
nineteenth-century letter writers, the postcard correspondence of 
First World War soldiers and a twenty-first century email discussion 
list.

Bio

Esther Milne has recently completed her Doctorate at the University 
of Melbourne. Her thesis, "Fantasies of Presence: Letters, Postcards, 
Email", examines a range of material practices, technological 
modalities and cultural formations, to show the interrelation between 
fantasies of presence and concepts of intimacy and disembodiment. 
She lectures in media & communications at Swinburne University with a 
particular focus on new media history and the technological 
imaginary. <http://www.swin.edu.au/sbs/>.  She is also one of the 
facilitators for Fibreculture, the Australasian network for internet 
research and critical theory <http://www.fibreculture.org> and one of 
the Editors for Fibreculture Journal, http://journal.fibreculture.org


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Monday 5 July, 2004
4.15-5.15pm, Venue: L116, South Building

[followed by drinks]

Danny Butt <danny at dannybutt.net>
School of Design, Unitec New Zealand

Abstract

"Market Cultures/Culture Markets: Perspectives on Inequality in the 
Creative Economy"

Diverse academic disciplines are beginning to develop specific roles 
for information in the economy. Information economics highlights 
distinctive properties for information, services, and other 
immaterial goods. Economic and cultural sociology has demonstrated 
the socially and culturally embedded nature of markets. In 
Marxist-inflected Cultural Studies there has been a long debate about 
the relationship  between the cultural/ideological "superstructure" 
and the economic base. New Media studies has shown the limitations of 
a "Digital Divide" based on physical and financial resources, 
emphasising the importance of social and cultural factors in IT use. 
This paper argues that we can productively synthesise aspects of this 
work to theorise socio-economic inequality in the emerging 
informational environments. Such a perspective requires attention to 
the perspectives of those excluded from highly informational markets, 
and attention to the cultural basis of our understanding of "the 
economy".


Bio

Danny Butt lectures in Theory at Unitec School of Design, and former 
Director of the Creative Industries Research Centre at Waikato 
Institute of Technology. He also runs #place, a dialogue on location, 
cultural politics, and social technologies. Danny is a facilitator 
for Fibreculture, Australasia's peak network for Internet research 
and theory; a member of ORBICOM - the UNESCO Chairs in 
Communications; and New Zealand representative on the Panel of 
Authors for ORBICOM/UNDP's Digital Review of Asia Pacific. Before 
entering the academic field his professional career spanned the 
music, publishing, new media, contemporary arts, and advertising 
industries.

http://www.dannybutt.net, http://www.place.net.nz,
http://fibreculture.org


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Tuesday 6 July, 2004
Venue: L116, South Building

External review of the research program in Digital Media & Digital Culture

11am - Introduction of the presentation and its purpose
11.15 Dan Fleming
11.35 Daniel Jewesbury
11.55 Paul Moore
12.15 Ned Rossiter

short break

12.40-1.40 Respondents: Danny Butt and Esther Milne


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Tuesday 25 August, 2004
11am-12pm, Venue: TBA

Dr Chris Chesher <c.chesher at unsw.edu.au>
School of Media and Communications, University of New South Wales, Australia
http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/

Abstract

"Invocation, Evocation and Avocation in New Media Art"

New media art distracts and summons its users, calls up events based 
on their actions, and brings up specific sensations and affects: it 
works with avocations, invocations and evocations. As a domain for 
experimentation that adapts available technologies to aesthetic ends, 
new media art defamiliarises standard artefacts to reveal the modes 
of interaction and expression characteristic of all computers (or 
invocational media).

Using work by Luc Courchesne, Char Davies and Gary Hill, this paper 
explores how different works mobilise these three primitive 
technocultural formations. It draws on Deleuze's concept of the 
movement image as a "genetic element" in cinema to identify the 
invocation as a genetic element in computer-based media.

Avocations generate users' awareness and desire to perform 
invocations. Avocations predetermine the semantic and syntactic 
limits of possible invocations through material interfaces and 
software coding. Once users are attracted, they are granted a 
capacity to invoke. Evocations manifest invocations as sensations, 
tuned to produce affective reactions in users that may feed back as 
avocations towards further invocations: the cybernetic refrain 
characteristic of invocational media.

Bio

Dr Chris Chesher is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and 
Communications at the University of New South Wales with an unhealthy 
obsession with new media. He wrote his PhD at Macquarie University on 
what makes computer-based media distinctive, arguing that they are 
characterised by their capacity to call up things, and should be 
reconceptualised as "invocational media". He established, and now 
coordinates the MA (New Media) program at UNSW, which introduces new 
media practitioners to contemporary cultural theory. He has been at 
UNSW since 1997, the first year of the BA (Media and Communications), 
a program with a strong emphasis on new media theory and practice. 
Before this he taught at Macquarie, UTS and Newcastle.

As one of the facilitators of the critical Internet studies mailing 
list Fibreculture, he organised the "Networks of Excellence" 
conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in November 
2002. He recently co-edited a special edition of Media International 
Australia on computer games and media studies methodologies. His 
writing can be found online in Cultronix, Ctheory and CultureMachine, 
in hard copy in several books, and in journals including Convergence 
and Media International Australia.


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Tuesday 12 October, 2004
1-2pm, Venue: TBA

Dr. Daniel Jewesbury <d.jewesbury at ulster.ac.uk>
Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster

Abstract

"The Affects of Reality: Dialectical Aesthetics and Digital Media"

(i)
Question: Can art make a fairer, more just society?
The question, often voiced, betrays an angst on the part of the 
questioner: why *doesn't* art appear to have the capacity to bring 
about real social transformation? What should I, as an artist, be 
doing to address this? *How can I make myself feel less guilty about 
my art?*

Talk about "the social role of art" is necessarily positioned 
somewhere between two poles: one dictating that art must be capable 
of effecting direct social change or have clear social use, the other 
arguing that it must "transcend" the merely material. Neither 
position is viable. If one cannot justify art *in its own terms*, one 
falls back on instrumentalisms (couched in terms of dimly-defined 
"communities" or "publics") in order to find a worth presumed not to 
be immanent in the work itself. Instrumentalised approaches to art 
lead to patronising, paternalistic assumptions about its 
"benevolence", and produce an "art" devoid of any aesthetic merit 
whatsoever (however that is accounted for).

(ii)
This paper gives an account of the "dialectical aesthetic", through 
which it argues a case for art as a *non-instrumental* "good". 
Appropriating the late work of György Lukács (only available, in 
English, through secondary sources), and combining it with other more 
recent contributions, I theorise an *ethical aesthetic*, in which 
form, content and context inflect and inform one another, a critical 
realism beyond mere naturalism, with which to *re-envisage* (rather 
than merely represent) the world, and through which to develop 
"consciousness" of the contradictory conditions of that world.

The paper then asks whether the theorisation of a distinctive 
"digital aesthetics" is desirable, or even tenable. By introducing 
certain formal characteristics and social contexts of digital media 
(hypertext and hyperlinks, globalisation, and so on) into the 
dialectical aesthetic, it is demonstrated that the "new" media can 
never be adequately theorised in "novel" technology-centered 
conceptualisations.


Bio

Dr Daniel Jewesbury is an artist and writer based in Belfast, and a 
Research Associate in Digital Cultures at the Centre for Media 
Research, University of Ulster. He completed his PhD at the Media 
Studies department of the University of Ulster in 2001, writing on 
potential theoretical relations between hybridity and non-linear 
narrative media. It was the first piece of part-practical research 
undertaken in the department, with practical outcomes comprising a 
website and digital video installation based around the dislocated 
site of London Bridge, in Arizona.

Exhibitions include Manifesta3, Ljubljana (2000), Urban Control, Graz 
(2001) and various others across Europe and North America. He won the 
Victor Treacy Award at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, in 2001. Recent 
public art projects include Exchange (2003), a radio station and 
short film produced with a diverse group of immigrants in Carlow, 
Ireland (including asylum-seekers, refugees and migrant workers). One 
to Ten (2002) was produced in collaboration with the Transport & 
General Workers' Union, Flax Art Studios and the Routes Public Art 
Project; it used interviews with bus workers and videos of bus 
journeys around Belfast to explore the rapidly changing character of 
the city as it undergoes redevelopment and regeneration. The work was 
presented in cinemas across the city. He is currently engaged on two 
major projects: Lisburn Road Archive, a photographic documentation of 
the middle-class in a Belfast suburb commissioned by Belfast Exposed 
Photography (in collaboration with Ursula Burke); and Bhowani 
Junction, a major film installation project (in collaboration with 
sound artist Paul Moore).  The first part of the Bhowani project, the 
artist's book Of Lives Between Lines, is published by Book Works. 
Jewesbury is a co-director of Cinilingus, an independent 
film-screening organisation in Belfast, and co-editor of Variant 
magazine (http://www.variant.org.uk).


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Tuesday 19 October, 2004
1pm-2pm Venue: TBA

Ned Rossiter <n.rossiter at ulster.ac.uk>
Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster

Abstract

"WSIS vs. Organised Networks: Information, Democracy and the Problem 
of Institutional Scale"

This paper assesses the recent World Summit on the Information 
Society (WSIS) held in Geneva last December. With disputes amongst 
various representatives over issues such as domain names, root 
servers, IP addresses, spectrum allocation, software licensing and 
intellectual property rights, the summit demonstrated that the 
architecture of information is a hugely contested area. As evidenced 
in official WSIS documents, consensus between governments, civil 
society groups, NGOs and corporations over these issues is 
impossible. Representation at the summit itself was a problem for 
many civil society groups and NGOs. As a UN initiative geared toward 
addressing the need for access to ICTs, particularly for developing 
countries, the problem of basic infrastructure needs such as adequate 
electricity supply, education and equipment requirements were not 
sufficiently addressed.

Against this background, this paper argues that the question of scale 
is a central condition to the obtainment of democracy. Moreover, what 
models of democracy are global entities such as the WSIS aspiring to 
when they formulate future directions for informational policy? Given 
the crisis of legitimacy of rational consensus, deliberative models 
of democracy, this paper argues that democracy within information 
societies needs to be rethought in terms of organised networks of 
communication that condition the possibility of new institutions that 
are attentive to problems of scale. Such a view does not preclude 
informational networks that operate across a range of scales, from 
sub-national to supra-national; rather, it suggests that new 
institutional forms that can organise socio-technical relations in 
ways that address specific needs, desires and interests are a key to 
obtaining informational democracy.


Bio

Ned Rossiter is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media) at 
the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster, Northern 
Ireland.  Ned is co-editor of Politics of a Digital Present: An 
Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory (Melbourne: 
Fibreculture Publications, 2001) and Refashioning Pop Music in Asia: 
Cosmopolitan Flows, Political Tempos and Aesthetic Industries 
(London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). Ned is also a co-facilitator of 
fibreculture, a network of critical Internet research and culture in 
Australasia (http://www.fibreculture.org).


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Tuesday 16 November, 2004
time & venue tba

Dr Soenke Zehle <soenke.zehle at web.de>
Research consultant, Transcultural Anglophone Studies
(Tas), Saarland University, Germany

Workshop

Further details soon
-- 
Ned Rossiter
Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media)
Centre for Media Research
University of Ulster
Cromore Road
Coleraine
Northern Ireland
BT52 1SA

tel. +44 (0)28 7032 3275
fax. +44 (0)28 7032 4964
email: n.rossiter at ulster.ac.uk



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