LEONARDO 39:4 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial

Disentangling the Seams

by Greg Niemeyer

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Summit Introduction

The Pacific Rim New Media Summit

by Joel Slayton

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Welcome

Network Theory: Art, Science and Technology in Cultural Context

by Roger Malina

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Container Culture

Introduction

by Steve Dietz and Gunalan Nadarajan

ABSTRACT: Container Culture is an exhibition developed by the Curatorial Working Group of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit. Each curator has selected one or more emerging regional artists to present at ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006, using a shipping container not only as its means of transportation but also as the "white cube" for the works' exhibition. Curators: Zhang Ga, Ellen Pau, Gunalan Nadarajan, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Johan Pijnappel, Soh Yeong Roh, Deborah Lawler-Dormer.

Curator Statements

by Zhang Ga, Ellen Pau, Gunalan Nadarajan, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Johan Pijnappel, Soh Yeong Roh, Deborah Lawler-Dormer

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Education

HowTo: the will to organize

by Rob van Kranenburg

ABSTRACT: The coming decade worldwide will be determined by the strained relationship between formal and informal structures and environments. A design for commoning, for living together locally in a globally connected world, is the new challenge. Bottom-up online and sensor-based innovation (wikipedia, commons-based peer production, thinglink) will create its own informal networks running parallel to top-down systems, such as nation states and the EU itself.

Technology Issues and the New ICTs

by Roberto Verzola

ABSTRACT: The author provides examples of low-cost information and communications technologies (ICTs) and suggests five major strategies for their low-cost deployment in developing countries: (1) appropriate technology, (2) free/open software, (3) compulsory licensing, (4) pay-per-use public stations and (5) community/public ownership of ICT infrastructure. Aside from the problems of affordability and universal access, the author identifies the Internet's built-in biases for (1) English, (2) subsidizing globalization, (3) automation and (4) the technofix, and explores the implications of these biases. The challenge is not only to design affordable and accessible technologies or to redesign technologies to be consistent with our deeply held values, but also to make ourselves less technology dependent.

The Bandung Center for New Media Arts: Local Commitment and International Collaboration

by Marie Le Sourd

ABSTRACT: Based on an interview between the author and Bandung Center co-founder Gustaff H. Iskandar, the article focuses on the Bandung Center for New Media Arts (BCNMA), an autonomous cultural space set up in 2001 by three Indonesian artists and architects. The BCNMA aims to encourage a dialogue with circles outside the art world and to offer greater dynamic possibilities for experimental forms of expressions. The Indonesian sociopolitical context after 1998 has had a great influence on the nature, development and methodologies used by this center. The case study of the Third Asia-Europe Art Camp, co-organized in 2005 by the BCNMA and the Asia-Europe Foundation, also highlights how international projects are developed by the BCNMA while taking into consideration the local cultural networks and creative environment.

Notions on Policy in Eastern Asia-Europe Media Spaces

by Rob van Kranenburg

ABSTRACT: The author argues that we must not aim to define, alter or transform practices, processes, places or people, but rather to define a vision that inspires and empowers young people toward creativity in their concrete experience of agency in this seemingly undesignerly new ambient world.

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Place, Ground and Practice

Introduction: Local Knowledge: Place and New Media Practice

by Danny Butt

ABSTRACT: "Local knowledge" denotes insider information such as, in the surfing world, under what conditions a particular surf break might be good, or how to surf a particular wave most effectively. While some local knowledge can be shared, a certain amount is tacit and experiential and cannot be codified. The author reflects on the incommensurability of indigenous and settler versions of knowledge of the land, and how these echo in the activities of indigenous new-media practitioners.

Compasses, Meetings and Maps: Three Recent Media Works

by Rachel O'Reilly

ABSTRACT: The article explores possible cultural approaches to new-media art aesthetics and criticism through an in-depth appraisal of recent works by three contemporary practitioners from Asia and the Pacific: Lisa Reihana, Vernon Ah Kee and Qiu Zhijie. Particular attention is paid to the issues of place, location and cultural practice in their work, issues currently under-examined in new-media art discourse. The analysis pays close attention to the operationality of the works, the influence of pre-digital aesthetic histories and the richly locative and virtual schemas of indigenous epistemologies that serve to meaningfully expand Euro-American notions of locative media art.

Making Things Our Own: The Indigenous Aesthetic in Digital Storytelling

by Candice Hopkins

ABSTRACT: This essay makes use of the characteristics of oral storytelling to define indigenous perspectives on narrative and to provide a framework in which to interpret video and new media art created by Zacharias Kunuk, Nation to Nation's Cyberpowwow project and Paula Giese's Native American Indian Resources.

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Urbanity and Locative Media

Locative-Media Artists in the Contested-Aware City

by Anthony Townsend

ABSTRACT: The adoption of mobile devices as the computers of the 21st century marks a shift away from the fixed terminals that dominated the first 50 years of computing. Associated with this shift will be a new emphasis on context-aware computing. This article examines design approaches to context-aware computing and argues that the evolution of this technology will be characterized by an interplay between top-down systems for command and control and bottom-up systems for collective action. This process will lead to the emergence of "contested-aware cities," in which power struggles are waged in public spaces with the assistance of context-aware systems.

Locative Arts

by Drew Hemment

ABSTRACT: The author discusses the field of locative arts, focusing on works and interests from 2003 to 2004. An overview is presented of the artistic project types found within this field, and the author considers in depth a number of issues such as how projects are shaped by their reliance on positioning technologies and the importance of the social within this area of practice.

Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things

Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis

ABSTRACT: Locative media has been attacked for being too eager to appeal to commercial interests as well as for its reliance on Cartesian mapping systems. If these critiques are well founded, however, they are also nostalgic, invoking a notion of art as autonomous from the circuits of mass communication technologies, which the authors argue no longer holds true. This essay begins with a survey of the development of locative media, how it has distanced itself from net art and how it has been critically received, before going on to address these critiques and ponder how the field might develop.

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Latin America/Pacific-Asia New Media Initiatives

Introduction: Pacific Rim New Media Development: A Search for Terra Incognita

by José-Carlos Mariategui

ABSTRACT: Now that technology is reaching ubiquity, we see how each country has a different approach toward it. The author considers the question, Why create a Latin America/Pacific-Asia New Media Initiatives Group? and emphasizes that we cannot look solely toward the linear and rational world of technology to solve complex and non-linear social problems. Thinking in a non-linear way by considering examples of our micro-realities offers radical contrasts and hence unpredicted behaviors that will influence our notion of reality.

Creative Industries in Beijing: Initial Thoughts

by Ned Rossiter

ABSTRACT: This article reports on current developments within "creative industries" in Beijing. The article discusses Dashanzi Art District and the Created in China Industrial Alliance in relation to such issues as labor, intellectual-property regimes, real-estate speculation, high-tech development zones, promotional cultures and the global variability of neoliberal capitalism. The article maintains that creative industries, as realizations of a policy concept undergoing international dissemination, are most accurately understood as cultural practices in trans-local settings that overlap with larger national and geopolitical forces.

Art and New Technology in Mexico: The National Center for the Arts

by Andrea Di Castro

ABSTRACT: The author chronicles the history of Mexico's Centro Nacional de las Artes (National Center for the Arts) in Mexico City, and in particular the Multimedia Center, a space dedicated to the creation and teaching of the arts and preservation of cultural heritage through the use of new technologies such as CD-ROMs, the Internet and teleconferencing, as well as exhibitions. After 10 years of operation, the Multimedia Center faces new types of challenges as the new technologies become successfully integrated into creative practice. In response to the changing environment, the center is moving toward collaborations with similar institutions internationally and toward new funding models.

Crafting Change: Envisioning New-Media Arts as Critical Pedagogy

by Geetha Narayanan

ABSTRACT: As India enters the sixth year of the new millennium, there seems to be ample evidence to validate the claim that it is new technologies and their infrastructures that have supported and enabled its current economic revolution. This revolution promises a new society based on knowledge and information. This emphasis poses tremendous challenges to educators and forces them to question the fundamental tenets on which they would develop pedagogies and create learning that is both sustainable and critical. The author argues that the process of creating new media art can in itself be construed as critical pedagogic practice and that new-media artists have a role to play as public intellectuals.

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Piracy and the Pacific

Pirates of the Pacific Rim

by Steve Cisler

ABSTRACT: The term piracy once referred simply to crimes at sea but now also refers to widespread crimes by which intellectual property is copied and sold or given away through electronic networks and in kiosks, shops and flea markets. Countries such as the U.S.A., whose origins were based on technology piracy, are now the most protective. Companies that were once sued for infringement are now suing others. Piracy is cited as a source of income for criminal and extreme political groups. Cultural appropriation of traditional herbs, songs and art is not easily combated. Fake drugs and airline parts create safety issues that are not encountered with pirated books or DVDs. Some scholars and legal experts have called for abandoning copyright or have proposed alternative schemes for intellectual property.

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The Invisible Dynamics of the Pacific Rim and the Bay Area

Introduction: Common Systems: The Invisible Dynamics of the Pacific Rim and the Bay Area

by Susan Schwartzenberg, Peter Richards and Jeannette Redensek

ABSTRACT: Invisible Dynamics is an interdisciplinary project that invites art/science research teams to explore the systems and behaviors, both urban and natural, that give the San Francisco Bay Area its definitive character. The project engages the domains of art, design, cultural geography, cartography, information design, sociology, archaeology, hydrology, ecology, marine sciences and history. The authors posit that it is instructive to look at and try to understand some of the dynamics of the Bay region as a step toward understanding the complexities of the systems that define the Pacific Rim.

The Exploratorium's Invisible Dynamics Project: Environmental Research as Artistic Process

by Annie Lambla

ABSTRACT: The Invisible Dynamics project is based at the Exploratorium in San Francisco; it seeks to manifest the inevitable and reciprocal relationship between art and science that is at the heart of the museum's mission. An attempt to visualize invisible, often cartographic, systems in the San Francisco Bay Area, it places various elements of Bay Area life in a context that can then proportionally be used to relate San Francisco to the greater Pacific Rim in a similar scalar relationship. The following study is based on ethnographic research with participants in this multidisciplinary project. The paper analyzes one part in particular of the Invisible Dynamics project---Hidden Ecologies, a photographic, cartographic collaboration between a microbiologist and an architect. The subjective and consistently similar ideas of the flexibility between artistic and scientific processes are expressed by those involved in Hidden Ecologies as well as the "artists" of the other three projects that make up Invisible Dynamics.

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