Making Sense of ISEA2008 (Without Any Decent Statistics).
Review of this year's ISEA2008 by Brogan Bunt. Held in Singapore from 25 July - 3 August, hosted in Asia for the second time in its history. An international symposium on Electronic Art, for the critical discussion and showcase of creative productions applying new technologies in interactive and digital media.
"In his weirdly scheduled ISEA2008 lecture - delivered the day after the closing night party - Lev Manovich argued that we have shifted from a state of new media to one of 'more' media. There is simply so much media these days (the product of new technologies and social interactive forms) that it is humanly impossible to gain an overall perspective. Our only viable option is to draw upon the quantitative methods that have driven contemporary science and business. We must data-mine culture in order to develop new methods of visualization that have the potential to represent cultural patterns indiscernible to the naked critical eye and provide a necessary interface to the universe of specific cultural objects. Manovich dubs this new critical and expressive field, 'cultural analytics'. While I am suspicious that significant aspects of culture are so easily amenable to discrete quantitative representation, Manovich's lecture, delivered to a packed audience, resonated very much with my experience of ISEA2008. With its 800 delegates, five concurrent streams, juried exhibition and huge range of associated panels, seminars, workshops and exhibitions, ISEA2008 was anything but digestible. As Andreas Broeckmann suggested at the ISEA board meeting, every participant is likely to have had a substantially different experience of the event depending upon their particular path through it. A stronger and more clearly integrated keynote program may have helped, but there are clear issues of scale that no manner of organization can solve. Lacking the means to effectively data-mine the event, all I can offer here is a sample of issues that emerged for me."
Click link below for main article... http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=310 Visit main page for recent reviews/interviews/articles http://www.furtherfield.org Other reviews on furtherfield.org here http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews.php ______________________________________________ SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe Info, archive and help: http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
