A Still Water / New Media program
Still Water* at the University of Maine presents a series of special lectures and workshops from 17-19 September 2003 on the topic of code and creativity. Presenters at these events include world-renowned artists and scholars as well as our illustrious undergraduate and graduate students. Admission is free to all events.
[] indicates private events. Please contact new media professor Joline Blais (581-4486) if you'd like to attend any private events, as seating for them is limited.
***Wednesday 17 September***
Creativity, Code, and Community
7-9 pm
100 Neville
Graduate students Alexandre Berthier. Karl-Otto von Oertzen, and Ersellia Ferron present a sample of the installations, performances, and movies they have created to reflect on the increasing role information plays in today's society. Members of the undergraduate "CodePlay" team, fresh from last week's presentation at Ars Electronica in Austria, will show some of the work they presented to cutting-edge artists and technologists from around the world.
***Thursday 18 September***
[New media class visit]
9:30-10:45 am
420 Chadbourne
Visiting artists and scholars discuss code as art with Joline Blais's New Media 300 class.
[Lunch with visitors and selected faculty]
11:30 am -12:30 pm
University Club
Tech tte--tte (part 1)
1-2:30 pm
Coe Room, 1st floor of Union
In these small-scale workshops, visitors, faculty, and students share ideas and demo projects in an informal setting with laptops and wireless Internet access. Participants include John Klima, Mark Napier, and Christiane Paul. Refreshments can be purchased from the nearby food court. Limited seating.
[Eyebeam conference call]
3:30-4:30 pm
Location to be announced
Visiting artists and scholars get a sneak preview of planning for the upcoming critical forum Distributed Creativity, a collaboration between Still Water and New York's Eyebeam Atelier.
***Friday 19 September***
Code As Creative Writing
10-10:50 am
DPCorbett 107
Visiting artists and scholars present outstanding examples of software art and survey the effect of digital technologies on artmaking in general.
[The Future of Code: An Internet2 teleconference]
11:30 am - 2:30 pm
123 Neville Hall (in the Computing Center Wing)
The first-generation Internet provided artists a powerful and pervasive environment in which to learn, write, and distribute art based on code. Yet current legal and technological trends suggest that this environment may be undergoing a paradigm shift. This international colloquium will bring together new media artists, curators, and technologists to probe the uncertain future of code art in an increasingly high-bandwidth network. Will the fears of broadcast monopolies about pirated music and movies drive the net toward closed formats and pay-per-view culture? Will Internet 2 and Video on Demand usher in an age where Hollywood and cable companies dominate Internet culture, squeezing out software artists, bloggers, and other individual producers? How might software artists exploit the fledgling second-generation Internet--from Max-based video mixers to Extreme Programming paradigms--to reveal its connective and participatory potential?
Visiting artists and scholars will join in this intercontinental debate with new media contacts from London, Paris, Toronto, and New York. Seating is very limited.
Tech tte--tte (part 2)
2:30-4 pm
Still Water lab, 4th floor of Chadbourne Hall
Participants include Alex Galloway and Liza Sabater.
Alex Galloway (http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ag111/) is an artist, computer programmer, and Assistant Professor of Media Ecology at New York University whose work explores such technologies as network protocols and computer gaming. As the founding member of the Radical Software Group (RSG), Galloway created the data surveillance system Carnivore, which was awarded a Golden Nica at Ars Electronica 2002. Galloway's first book, PROTOCOL, or, How Control Exists After Decentralization, will be published in 2003 by The MIT Press.
John Klima (http://www.cityarts.com) is an artist and computer programmer whose work explores the creative potential of interactive 3D graphics to create real-time interactive visual and auditory environments. He has worked with companies such as Microsoft, Turner Broadcasting, and Dun & Bradstreet as well as traditional art venues, including exhibitions in New York at the Whitney Museum and Postmasters Gallery as well as at exhibitions and festivals in Europe and Japan.
Mark Napier (http://potatoland.org) is an Internet artist whose work reveals the Web's visual and collaborative potential. Originally a painter, Napier turned to software to address issues of authority, ownership and territory in the virtual world. Works by Napier and Liza Sabater have been commissioned for the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim, exhibited in numerous international venues, and reviewed in the New York Times and other international publications.
Christiane Paul (http://www.whitney.org/airport) is a curator and new media critic whose specialties include digital narrative and software art. As Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, she curated the acclaimed CODeDOC and Data Dynamics exhibitions. Paul has also served as editor of the magazine Intelligent Agent and recently published the Thames & Hudson book Digital Art.
Liza Sabater (http://culturekitchen.com) is a writer and cultural critic whose interests include the practical, academic, and theoretical sides of Web-based writing journals, or blogs. A frequent collaborator with Mark Napier, Sabater is also active in open source and open content experimentation with micro-publishing. The subjects of her own blog, Culturekitchen, range from Internet art to Latin American politics to alternative educational paradigms such as "deschooling."
*Still Water, a New
Media program of the University of Maine at Orono, was founded in 2002 by
Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito to promote network art and culture. Although
the program's title derives from the name of a river that flows alongside
the physical facility, "still water" also connotes the values electronic
and cultural networks need to thrive. These include transparency, open access to ideas and code; variability, the capacity to morph into new configurations
as the need arises; and stillness, a rare quality in today's frenetic culture
but one demanded by any creative endeavor. Still Water is not a center--for
a successful network has none--but a medium primed for the transmission of
multiple waves of culture.
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