Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Ulises Mejias and Trebor Scholz: The challenges and affordances of participation in the age of networked individualism.

This Floating Points event will start with Ulises Mejias and Trebor Scholz both presenting their positions about opportunities and problems with participation in sociable web media. They will then discuss each others argumentation and end with a debate open to the public at large.

The sheer scale of current networked sociality demonstrates the potential of sociable web media to democratize society through emerging cultures of broad participation. While phenomena like information overload accompanied the emergence of communication technologies for a very long time, this current social turn is new. Millions of people can now perform themselves as speakers, which is more pertinent than the question of quality or even political orientation of the produced content. In his presentation, titled "The Participatory Challenge," Trebor Scholz will investigate the affordances of sociable web media by looking at examples of the different intensities and motivations for participation in sociable web media and their effects.

Is production the new consumption? In "Networked participation: Wisdom of crowds or stupidity of masses?" Ulises Mejias will assess whether sociable web media can live up to its promise of reinvigorating the public sphere. While participatory networks are certainly posing an alternative to the ways in which the old mass media generates and disseminates messages, there is increasing skepticism about their ability to transform this aggregation of (mostly self-referential) information into meaningful social change. Furthermore, participatory media networks run the risk of being appropriated by the same mass media networks that contribute to the alienation of the individual within society. To understand why this is happening, we need to engage in a critique of the network as a model for organizing social realities. Only then will we be able to conceptualize new social realities that incorporate the best of networked participation with other ways of being in the world.

Ulises Ali Mejias is an educator and technocultural theorist whose research interests include networked sociality, the philosophy of technology, and learning design. He is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, where he has taught a graduate seminar on the affordances of social media. His dissertation, "Networked Proximity: ICT's and the Mediation of Nearness" deals with the redefinition of social relevancy by digital media and explores the limits of the network as metaphor and model for organizing social realities. Mr. Mejias has been nominated two years consecutively for an EduBlog award.ideant.typepad.com

Trebor Scholz is a media theorist, artist, and activist who lectures internationally on the affordances of networked sociality for media activism, art, and education. As founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), he contributed essays to several books, journals, and periodicals and co-edited "The Art of Free Cooperation," forthcoming with Autonomedia (NYC). He is currently assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo and research fellow at the Hochschule fuer Kunst und Gestaltung, Zurich (Switzerland). collectivate.net

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

McKenzie Wark: Gamer Theory from screen to page.

Gamer Theory is an experiment in the collaborative writing of theory. This might seem a contradictory exercise. Theory as a genre is always counter intuitive, always written against the grain. How could the consensus-oriented process of collaborative writing be of use? Since the project was book-length, my collaborators at the Institute for the Future of the Book also had to come up with solutions for navigating a large chunk of text. Then there were questions to do with intellectual property: would anyone buy a printed book if it had all been online already? In this presentation I will go through these and other questions that came up in the process of designing and writing Gamer Theory, through to its publication as a book this month by Harvard University Press.

McKenzie Wark is responsible for the networked book: (in progress): GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 created to investigate new approaches to writing in the networked environment, and to see what happens when authors and readers are brought into conversation over an evolving text. He is an Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City. He is the author of several books, including A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press) and Dispositions (Salt Publishing).

David Weinberger: Everything is Miscellaneous.

The digital revolution has created billions of shards of knowledge and information. Now we are inventing processes and techniques for pulling them together, unconstrained by the physical limitations that have silently guided our traditional principles of organizing ideas. For example, we used to assume that everything has to have its place, and a perfect organization of ideas has no exceptions. Now we're learning that we're better off making a big pile, including everything, and allowing users to sort and order the information as they need it. From Britannica to Wikipedia, news media to blogs, the Dewey Decimal system to "folksonomies," we are overturning the old assumptions about who is an authority, who is an expert, and who gets to decide what's worth knowing. cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/david_weinberger

David Weinberger, Ph.D. is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is a co-author of the best-selling Cluetrain Manifesto, and the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. He has written for Wired, Salon, The Guardian, The NY Times, USA Today, Harvard Business Review and many others. His new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, will be published in May by Times Books. He lives in Brookline.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Museum of Science, Cahners Theater, 7 pm



The Art of Living a Second Life

Wagner James Au (aka Hamlet Linden), John Lester (aka Pathfinder Linden), and John (Craig) Freeman (aka JC Freemont); moderated by Eric Gordon (aka Boston Borst).

Venue: Museum of Science, Cahners, free

Called "the biggest digital art installation in the world" (Warren Ellis), Second Life is a highly imaginative, online, 3-D rendered environment populated with avatars (graphic representations of people). In Second Life you can teleport, fly, live in a house, go to clubs, take classes, make and view art, or just "hang out." You cannot drown and you do not age. Spanning more than 42,000 acres in real-world scale--larger than metropolitan Boston--Second Life is second home to over 2 million "residents," many of whom collaboratively create its content. It is a place where real business is conducted using virtual dollars that can also be traded in the real world. Join us during the Boston Cyberarts Festival for a discussion about the creative, social and economic implications of Second Life.

Wagner James Au: 3-D virtual worlds: Second Life. What is it?

From April 2003 to February 2006, Au was a contract writer for Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, primarily hired by the company to cover SL as an embedded journalist in an emerging society, its controversies, its personalities, its innovations and ambitions, along with larger themes of identity, social norms and organization, and cultural expression important to online worlds in general. He has been interviewed by CNN International, NPR’s All Things Considered, the BBC, The Los Angeles Times, Harvard Business Review, News.com, the San Jose Mercury, the Associated Press, Wired Online, Presstime, and the East Bay Express, among other publications. He has spoken on the subject for The Education Arcade (sponsored by MIT), twice at South by Southwest in Austin, and twice at State of Play (sponsored by Yale and New York Law School.) Apart from New World Notes, he is also a contract consultant and copywriter for SL projects and advertising, and a seasoned game designer, screenwriter, and freelance journalist. Au is a contributor for GigaOM and occasionally for Kotaku. He has also freelanced for Salon and Wired for the past eight-ten years, along with writing for the Los Angeles Times, Lingua Franca, Game Developer, Gamespot, Gameslice, and other publications, primarily on game culture and the game industry, along with politics, film, and pop culture. Au is also a screenwriter (his script Future Tense was optioned by Canal Plus in 2001), and as a game developer, wrote for Electronics Arts’ groundbreaking conspiracy thriller Majestic and was a designer on America’s Army: Soldiers, an offshoot of the popular America’s Army game. http://nwn.blogs.com/

John Lester (Pathfinder Linden/Liam Roark): Community Development, healthcare and education in Second Life.

John Lester, more commonly known as Pathfinder Linden in Second Life, joined Linden Lab (the creators of Second Life) in 2005, bringing experience in online community development as well as a background in the fields of healthcare and education. Previously he was the Information Technology Director in the Neurology Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he pioneered the use of the web in 1993 to create online communities for supporting patients dealing with neurological disorders. Lester also held an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School, where he created online collaborative environments for professors and students to advance the case-based teaching method in medical education. While at Massachusetts General Hospital, he created and continues to manage BrainTalk Communities, an organization who's mission is to provide online environments for patient and caregiver self-help groups focused on neurological disorders.

Lester is currently a Community Manager at Linden Lab, where he focuses primarily on working with educators interested in using Second Life for teaching and academic research. He also works to advance the use of Second Life as a platform for "serious" applications such as healthcare training, patient support groups, simulation, and scientific visualization. Lester's continuing work with BrainTalk includes creating and supporting Second Life communities for people dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, and Stroke Survivors.

John Craig Freeman: Particapatory Installation Art in Second Life.

For the past several months, artist John Craig Freeman has been implementing his place-based virtual reality art project "Imaging Place" in Second Life. "Imaging Place" takes the form of a user navigated, interactive immersive installation that combines panoramic photography, digital video, and three-dimensional technologies to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. The goal of the project is to develop the technologies, the methodology and the content for truly immersive and navigable narrative, based in real places. The project has been under development since 1997 and includes work from around the world including Taipei Taiwan, São Paulo Brazil, Kamloops BC Canada, Warsaw Poland, the U.S./Mexico Border, Fort Point MA, Lowell MA, the Miami River, Kaliningrad Russia, Haverhill MA, Niagara, New England, Appalachia, and Florida.

In her article for Slatenight titled "Art and Aporia: Imaging Place, Lythe Witte writes, "The mode of interaction, ala Lev Manovich’s “database narrative” and “soft cinema” , facilitates a place-based navigation where memory, location and hyperlink imbue a moment with the illusion of control over personal time and space gateways."

Freeman's work has been exhibited internationally including at the Zacheta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki (the national gallery of Warsaw), Kaliningrad Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Russia, Art Basel Miami, Ciberart Bilbao and the Girona Video and Digital Arts Festival in Spain, the Westside Gallery in New York City, La Biblioteca National in Havana, the Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary, the Center for Experimental and Perceptual Art (CEPA) in Buffalo, Mobius and Studio Soto in Boston, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, Ambrosino Gallery in Miami, the Photographers Gallery in London, and the Friends of Photography's Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco. In 1992 he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has been published in Leonardo, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Exposure, as well as a chapter in the book Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities. His work has been reviewed in Wired News, Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harper's and Der Spiegel. Freeman received a BA degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a MFA degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is currently an Associate Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston.ImagingPlace.net

Eric Gordon (Moderator): Research in Second Life.

Eric Gordon's current work focuses on place identification in digital networks. He looks at how real world institutions, places and spaces, become central to virtual environments and, more importantly, how virtual environments become central to real world spaces. He looks at how this "mixed reality" is taking place in use of camera phones, photo blogging, place blogging, and synthetic worlds like Second Life. He is finishing a book entitled The Urban Spectator, which examines how emerging media technologies and their resulting consumption patterns have altered the design and experience of the American urban landscape during the 20th century. http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/E/Eric_Gordon/