Distributed Aesthetics workshop (concept & participants)

Distributed Aesthetics Seminar, May 11-12, 2006
Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute of Advanced Study), Berlin

Concept and List of Participants

By Geert Lovink & Anna Munster

The idea, in short, is to reformulate an aesthetics for the Internet and other networks (such as mobile phones). This has become a necessity because increasingly ‘network aesthetics’ has become synonymous with ‘net art’, a movement that began during the 1990s but is now too narrow to describe more contemporary conceptual and artistic developments. These developments include the use of information networks for the development of a ‘creative commons’ (repositories of open and reusable creative resources and media); online and offline networked performances in which both audience and performers may be situated simultaneously in physical and informatic spaces; locative media, which have been used aesthetically to interrogate the pervasiveness of surveillance and tracking technologies in the politics of fear and terror, to name only a few instances of the interactions between networks and aesthetics. Many of these network engagements occur beyond both the gallery and the commodified art market; they are characterized by their distributed participation, production and dissemination. The exhibition of network art remains problematic. Critical aesthetic engagement with these networks and their events cannot take place outside the network in a disengaged, contemplative mode. Their capture into the formal space of curating as ‘screen-based’ art is only a secondary and inconsequential manifestation of their aesthetic life.

The concept of ‘distributed aesthetics’ is introduced here to re-open a debate about contemporary practices that are not primarily focused on the art market and the spectatorial relations of gallery and audience. Although a significant body of theoretical work has already grown around the politics, economies and socialities of networks, very little theoretical exploration on the distributed aesthetics of networks has been undertaken. In conducting this workshop, we propose to begin a consolidated thinking through of the (sensual) experience  – the “aesthesia”– of networked events. How do we experience the current wave of blogs, podcasts, wikis and social networks? What network theory is used and is it adequate to the task of engaging networks on their own terms?

Hence the workshop will not simply work towards a typology of networked aesthetic practice. More importantly, it will consider what needs to be transformed within aesthetics itself in order to come to terms with the distributed spatio-temporalities of our time. We will begin with the proposition that both formal and medium-based aesthetics are too constrained by the histories of visual analysis and modernism to offer us much insight into networked practices and engagement.  Nevertheless, we do not propose a distributed aesthetics as the ‘new, new media’.  An understanding of and familiarity with a range of theoretical discourses and visual traditions in Western culture will make important contributions to formulating a distributed aesthetics. Therefore, we have sought a range of scholars for this workshop with expertise in narrative theory and analysis, the history and contemporary use of cartography, and knowledge of temporally based aesthetic theory such as that of Bergson.

The format of the seminar will that be of a workshop, with an emphasis on discussion, showcasing different websites, communities and software. The idea is not so much to have a series of papers but to work together on the further development of critical concepts. Obviously, digital aesthetics itself is one such category.

Confirmed participants:

Giselle Beiguelman is a new media artist and multimedia essayist who teaches Digital Culture at the Graduation Program in Communication and Semiotics of PUC-SP (São Paulo, Brazil). Her work includes the award-winnings “The Book after the Book” (1999) and egoscópio (2002).  She has been developing art projects for mobile phones (“Wop Art”, 2001). Beiguelman’s work appears in important anthologies and guides devoted to digital arts including Yale University Library Research Guide for Mass Media and has been presented in international venues such as Net_Condition (ZKM, Germany). http://www.desvirtual.com/

Brian Holmes is an art and cultural critic, activist and translator, living in Paris, interested primarily in the intersections of artistic and political practice. He was the English editor of publications for Documenta X, Kassel, Germany, 1997 (together with Catherine David), was a member of the graphic arts group Ne pas plier from 1999 to 2001, and has recently worked with the French conceptual art group Bureau d’études. He is a frequent contributor to the international mailinglist  Nettime, a member of the editorial committee of the art magazine “Springerin” and the political-economy journal “Multitudes”, a regular contributor to the magazine Parachute, and a founder of the new journal “Autonomie Artistique”. He is currently preparing a book in French, entitled “La personnalité flexible: Pour une nouvelle critique de la culture.”
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/auteur.php3?id_auteur=465

Richard Rogers is lecturer in New Media at the University of Amsterdam, recurrent Visiting Professor in the Philosophy and Social Study of Science at the University of Vienna, and Director of the Govcom.org Foundation (Amsterdam). Previously, Rogers worked as Senior Advisor to Infodrome, the Dutch Governmental Information Society initiative. Over the past five years, Rogers and the Govcom.org Foundation have received grants from the Dutch Government (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science), the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation. Rogers is author of Technological Landscapes (Royal College of Art, London, 1999), editor of Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web (Jan van Eyck Press, 2000), and author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004). http://www.govcom.org

Sebastian Lütgert is an author, programmer, media artist and activist. He is a co-founder of Bootlab, an independent Media Lab in Berlin, lecturer at Wissenschaftsakademie Berlin, and a regular contributor to various journals. Recent publications include “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction” (textz.com, 2004) and “The Society of Intellectual Property” (textz.com, 2005). He is currently exhibiting at Sony Center in Berlin and preparing a book on Cinema and Piracy.

Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. Before joining the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the Film & Digital Media Department, Warren was an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, a research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory, and a research collaborator in the Interrogative Design Group at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He earned a B.A. from Yale College and an S.M. and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. Lives in Santa Cruz (USA). Warren Sack has recently been publishing about “network aesthetics.” http://people.ucsc.edu/~wsack/

Mercedes Bunz is a researcher in the field of critical theory at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar and co-founder co-founder of debug – magazine for electronic aspects of life. Her dissertation on the history of the Internet will be published soon.

Nils Röller is a media theorist (_www.romanform.de)_, he is teaching “Cultural Studies” at the HGKZ (Academy for Design and Art in Zürich) in the Program for New Media. In February 2005 he published Ahabs Steuer – Navigationen zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft“, an essay on relations between art and science. Since 2001 he publishes online Notes of a candle-dealer, in 2002 he published online SMS MAKES LOVE, a novel written as a sequence of short messages.

Judith Rodenbeck is a professor of modern and contemporary art history and past chair of the Division of Visual Culture at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. An art historian whose research concentrates on advanced art practices since 1945, she is co-author (with Benjamin Buchloh) of Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts–events, objects, documents. Her writing on art and criticism of the 20th century has appeared in both scholarly and popular publications. She is the initiator of a wiki devoted to happenings and intermedia at Columbia University (http://happenings.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/). She is currently completing a book on happenings and Fluxus in the late 1950s and early 1960s and their relations to avant-garde theater, photography, and musical composition.

Clara Völker, living in Berlin, is writing her PhD on Virtuality and mobile media technologies at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She has been an editor at De:Bug, magazine for electronic aspects of life, for quite some years and now is a freelance writer. As DJ Caynd, she has been practically involved in connecting digital network technology and cultural practise – funded by the german federal foundation for culture, she set up an online-network for female hiphop activists, femalehiphop.net, in 2004. http://www.femalehiphop.net

Sabine Niederer, researcher and producer at the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. She works as a researcher, producer and curator of international events on new media, arts and digital culture, such as Hoogt 4 (2001-2004), Level Up Games Conference (2003), A Decade of Web Design (2005), Incommunicado 05 (2005), Urban Screens (2005) and The Art and Politics of Netporn (2005). She earned her MA in Art History from Utrecht University, and taught media theory at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and Utrecht University. She is currently lecturer in new media studies at the University of Amsterdam. Sabine is curator of the bi-monthly film and video programme, Cinematiek, and publishes regularly on new media and popular culture and runs a research project on databodies and surveillance theory. Professional pursuits include new media theory, visual arts, urban studies and social software.
http://www.networkcultures.org

Linda Wallace, Dutch-Australian new media artist, researcher and curator, based at the Wissenschaftskolleg 2005-2006. She is director of the new media company Machinehunger. Initially trained in 16mm cinematography, she has worked across artforms including sound/radio, installation, video and print. She has curated new media exhibitions in China, the UK, The Netherlands, India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and New Zealand. She did her (studio-based) PhD at the Australian National University, has a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of NSW and a Bachelor of Arts, Communications from the University of Technology, Sydney. http://www.machinehunger.com.au.

Charlotte Klonk, art historian and 2005-2006 Wissenschaftskolleg fellow where she is currently writing a book on displays in museums. The role of net art strategies and the Internet/new media in general is part of this study. She is teaching at the University of Warwick (UK), studied in Hamburg and Cambridge and wrote a book about the history of Brittish landscape art.

Trebor Scholz, artist, media theorist, activist, and organiser. He is currently professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His interests focus on media theory, art and education. In 2004 he founded the Institute for Distributed Creativity (www.distributedcreativity.org) , a research network that concentrates on cooperation studies. In 2005 the Institute organized “Share, Share Widely,” a conference about media art education (www.newmediaeducation.org) at the CUNY Graduate Center. In April 2004, with Geert Lovink he co-organized the conference Free Cooperation on the art of (online) collaboration, held at SUNY Buffalo (www.freecooperation.org). In 2000 he facilitated the only large scale program immediately responding to the Kosovo War- “Kosov@: Carnival in the Eye of the Storm.” (www.intheeyeofthestorm.info/)

Olga Goriunova lives and works in Moscow. She is a co-maker of the Readme software art festival series (Moscow 2002, Helsinki 2003, Aarhus 2004, Dortmund 2005), co-editor of related publications, and a co-organizer of Runme.org software art repository. She makes her doctorate studies in the Media Lab, University of Arts and Design Helsinki, conducting her research in production and management of creative practices on the Internet. Author of numerous articles on new media art and culture.