ISEA2002: connecting art & technology with transportation, transit, tourism, and theory

Nagoya, Japan, October 27-31.

Reviewed by Simone Osthoff

The first ISEA to take place in Asia, the Nagoya symposium in Japan, contributed to close distances between East and West while raising questions about the symposium’s forms in relation to space, place, and conference design. Any participant taking the journey to the conference in Japan experienced its theme—ORAI: comings and goings—at least in terms of transportation, transit, tourism, and commerce. Beyond theme, can ORAI also be seen as the conference formal and organizational key? From the opening ceremony, through the shows, performances, discussions, and panel presentations, the plurality of events, places, and experiences, made constant demands on one’s ability to choose—the impossibility of seeing and hearing everything, kept me both focused and disoriented, and continues now placing demands on the possibility of observation, description, and evaluation.

In the opening ceremony, at the beautiful International Design Center Nagoya, guest speaker Suda Hiroshi, the Chairman of the Central Japan Railway Company, addressed the theme Orai through the scope of the Japanese urban transit and communication systems. Hiroshi spoke of economic systems under the impact of internationalization and informatization, energy and environmental challenges, with their social and economic implications. His talk contrasted with the more abstract and holistic remarks of ISEA2002 president Kohmura Masao—who connected East and West, heavens and earth, employing a parallel between Pythagoras’ music of the spheres and the I Ching. The model Hiroshi put forward, however, where self-governing communities could act as administrative units supporting wide economic blocs, stressed the connection among natural, social, and economic resources, pointing to the need of urban designs to be, at once, ecologically sustainable, socially participative, and economically sound. In retrospect, Hiroshi’s model, which at the time seemed a bit odd in an art and technology symposium opening ceremony, offered an essential link between ISEA’s nomadic artistic and academic community and the place and institution hosting the conference. A connection that needs to be further examined in future conference designs, in the light of the obvious but overlooked fact that the academic conference-tourist-entertainment-consumer industry is in frank expansion.

Looking at ISEA as a social model in miniature—a geographically dispersed community of artists and researchers exploring participatory networks, non-linear systems, different notions of authorship’s intentionality and of responsibility, while imagining current and future relations between technology, art, and culture—one might be surprised by its tight and homogeneous academic network, which, while exploring a global connectivity, multiplicity, and dimensionality, in practice, tends to reinforce its own identity. If connectivity—social, artistic and otherwise—is to be fostered with rather unexpected partners, both regionally and globally, some critical discussion about process, form, and design seems to be in demand.

It was just an unfortunate example, or perhaps a symptomatic one, that the only scheduled live streaming event of the conference, connecting East and West in real time—room 0 in the Harbor Hall at Nagoya Port with the Sackler center at the Guggenheim Museum in N.Y.—organized by the Utrecht University of the Netherlands, did not occur for technical reasons. But the large panel did not give up. Anxious to connect with the New York museum, they tried to carry out the engagement through a long distance cell phone conversation, the phone being passed along from one panel member to another in a surrealist parody of dialog. To the small audience that remained in the room, this scene was painful and embarrassing to watch, as panel members made desperate attempts to convey their messages to the small audience at Harbor Hall, and at the same time, understand/respond to the questions placed over the phone. Another example of difficult connection, this time not the fault of technological failure, was the simple lack of space for social contact among conference participants (or perhaps too much space) eliminating the possibility of unexpected meetings over breakfast, for instance, whose importance for networking was completely undermined by the symposium organization as it opted for a flexible, yet too decentralized structure, which kept participants dispersed throughout the city’s many hotels and conference sites/events. Since the conference did not provide transportation between hotels and sites (not to mention info on tourism), one had to learn to navigate the city’s public transportation system and overcome language obstacles efficiently in a very short period of time.

Artworks, on the other hand, ended up being joined so seamlessly in the two large warehouse exhibition spaces at Nagoya Port, that they functioned as one big installation made mostly of exposed wires, projectors, and loud techno sounds—thus, erasing their particularities in visual and aural homogeneity. The dim lighting in the exhibition space further unified the individual installations, working well for most but not for all, and contributing to the sameness of the environment, that overall, appeared formulaic and amateur. Whether or not the answer to these large-scale new media exhibitions is a more rigorous curatorial and editorial presence—as I heard a few people expressing during the conference—I am not sure, since new media often embraces post studio practices of distributed, more experimental, and participatory means. Some balance between individual nuances and a dynamic group of works, however, might be possible with some rethinking of the exhibition format.

The possibility of combining geographical territorial movement with a rhetorical territory creates a unique space at the conference by merging movement and distance, theory and practice—a rich opportunity that the paper presentations, in general, did not explore, embrace, or acknowledge. The papers critical edge was further compromised by a lack of physical and emotional engagement with the theories they embraced. Usually read from behind one or more computer screens that presenters kept hiding behind, authors projected their voices through microphones, and in the dark, seemed completely disconnected from the audience in the room. How many twenty-minute papers (often longer) written in a language more appropriate for academic publication than to be heard, can one absorb in a conference? Utterly disengaging from the audience’s point of view, a few of these presentations were particularly exasperating as their innovative content contrasted directly with their form of delivery, bad use of web design, and tired academic language.

And yet, despite its shortcomings, I enjoyed the conference very much. The port city of Nagoya was certainly one of the most exciting and pleasant aspects of the five-day conference. With its beautiful geographic location, new urban and architectural structures, as well as a vibrant pop culture made of tradition and trendy fashion. Nagoya offered many possible articulations of space and place, which I hope, future conferences will explore in thematic choices, as well as in form, content, and design.