Out of the Hothouse and into the Wild [link]

The question of "automony or isolation" posed by Domenico Quaranta in his introduction to the 2009 ARCO Experts' Forum suggests that new media art has yet to find its place, that it is somehow withering on the vine (to borrow Quaranta's flower metaphor) on the margins of relevance, at the risk of never crossing the verge into the well-tended garden of Art.

Well, it would be a shame if new media never took root in the white cube, but it would be more of a loss for the white cube than for new media art. For the flowers of new media art that Domenico describes may be wild, but they are hardier than the dainty ornaments that the art world showers with attention and cash. This feral creativity has learned to survive in a world much bigger than the art world's cloistered hothouse. The most adaptable of these strains have taken root everywhere from junkyards to e-commerce sites. And nearly all of these strains have learned to cast their seeds on that most modern and global of prevailing currents, the Internet...

Can Creativity Be Crowdsourced? [link]

The Internet both attracts and repels art institutions. Curators wonder who could possibly ensure quality control in a world where 50,000 videos are added to YouTube each day. Fortunately, artists themselves were crowdsourcing long before the Internet: composer John Cage laid out the principles fourteen years before Richard Stallman founded the Gnu project and twenty-nine years before the term "open source" was coined. Taking a cue from the "Reweaving Community" chapter of At the Edge of Art, Jon Ippolito & John Bell are working to develop ways for artists to open source not only their art but their artistic process.

Whose Tool Is This Anyway? Art and Creative Misuse [link]

Drawing on the "Code As Muse" chapter of At the Edge of Art, Still Water co-director Jon Ippolito takes a look at emblematic cases of the transition from subversion through conversion to development in connections between art and industry in the last fifty years. This talk was first presented at the conference Subversion, Conversion, Development at the University of Cambridge, organized by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH).

At the Edge of Art [link]

As part of the Long Now Foundation's series of "Seminars in Long-term Thinking," Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito draw an analogy between art and antibodies, claiming that art offers society a long-term but unconscious memory in the same way that the human immune system offers its body a long-term somatic memory.

The authors will also contrast the attitude engineers and artists take toward their tools, arguing that artists work by creative misuse.

730pm
JCCSF, Kanbar Hall
3200 California St
San Francisco, CA 94118

Art After Institutions [link]

Participatory media like Flickr and YouTube have given ordinary netizens a chance to shine as media creators, but this fact hasn't gone down well with "serious" artists and their curatorial counterparts. Seemingly bereft of the social status, economic privilege, and institutional recognition of mainstream art stars, some new media artists wonder what role, if any, remains for them to play in the Web 2.0 age of peer-filtered creativity. New media art's dependence on institutions is indeed in crisis, but this is more of a loss for galleries and museums than for the artists themselves. For participatory media are on the verge of enabling creators to regain the power they once held before the era of commodity speculation and the art market: the ability to reconnect people in new forms of creative kinship, whereby artworks facilitate social transactions rather than financial ones. To accept this new role, however, artists, curators, and critics may have to renounce the pyramid scheme offered by the brick-and-mortar art world, replacing the monolithic canon of "Great Artists" with a dense network of creative participants.

In cooperation with the International Visitors Program for Media Arts organised by Digitaal Platform IAK/IBK and Flanders Image.
8:30pm

At the Edge of Art book party [link]

In this book launch at the University of Maine's Fogler Library, Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito show some highlights from At the Edge of Art and discuss the relationship between the new genres profiled in the book and the definition of "new media" as investigated by UMaine's New Media Department.

University Club
6pm

"Cold Peaks and Warm Foothills" [link]

Art historian Clive Bell famously described the contrast between virtuosic and communal art production as "cold peaks" versus "snug foothills of warm humanity". High culture's anxiety about distributed culture has reached new levels thanks to the explosion of participatory media online. Drawing on themes from At the Edge of Art, Jon Ippolito asks what's lurking in those snug foothills that gets academics all hot and bothered?

Bridge College of Design, Herberger College of the Arts
Noon

Artificial Life and Natural Death [link]

This discussion with Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand and Wired editor Kevin Kelly focuses on long-term approaches to digital preservation, from community efforts to build emulators to speculation about encoding the Library of Congress in the human genome. Drawing on material from the Edge chapter "Preserving Artificial Life," the panel is part of the New Media and Social Memory conference, organized by Richard Rinehart of the University of California, Berkeley. Video is archived at the link above.

Berkeley Art Museum

"New Media and Art" [link]

This round table organized by Beth Coleman of MIT's department of Comparative Media Studies is made up of leading figures in the field of media art curators, authors, network directors, and innovative developers who will address the current issues on art in the age of digital reproduction.

MIT building 2-105
5-7pm

"Art, Play, and Community: A Book Event with Joline Blais, Alex Galloway and Jon Ippolito" [link]

6:30-8:30pm

Rhizome and the New Museum are pleased to present "Art, Play, and Community," which will celebrate the release of Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito's At the Edge of Art and Alex Galloway's Gaming. Both ground-breaking books explore new media art as an expanded field that interacts with and enlivens disciplines from design to art to video games to science.

According to At the Edge of Art by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, art's recent eruption in fields as diverse as artificial life, computer games, and community activism reveals a seismic shift in the role it plays in society. No longer content to sit on a pedestal or auction block, these works infiltrate stock markets, sway court cases, and network bedrooms. Alex Galloway's Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture takes an in-depth look at one of these "edges" to probe the cultural history and activity of videogames, laying the foundation for critique that recognizes their distinct mechanisms and politics.

A brief dialogue between the authors will touch on such questions as the place of art in larger society, the history of community design as an artistic practice, and the role of flow versus arrest in gaming. The conversation will be followed by refreshments and a reception for the authors.

The New Museum Store 556 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 Tel: (212) 219-1222

"Indigenous Domain: Pilgrims, Permaculture, and Perl." [link]

10am-noon

Indigenous Domain discusses the limitations of current colonial paradigms for cyberspace which try to rope off "commons" or "reservations" for the public good, but which still operate within a larger colonial framework. The paper proposes alternatives to the prevailing colonial paradigm of the "commons" and "copyleft" based on both indigenous models and new digital practices including catchment, circles, and care.

"Art As Antibody: A Redefinition of Art for the Internet Age." [link]

4-6pm

Art's recent infiltration of stock markets, courtrooms, and mobile phones marks a seismic shift in the role it plays in society. The once-academic question "what is art" has acquired new urgency now that society depends on this collective immune system to confront technology's increasing encroachment into daily life. Drawing on case studies from our 2006 book At the Edge of Art, this paper examines the special powers granted art of the Internet age, which--no longer content to sit on a pedestal or auction block--can respond aggressively to the ethical crises caused by technology's infection of society.

[link]

4-5pm

Scheduled as part of USC's 2006 Vectors Fellowship residency, this discussion focuses on how At the Edge of Art relates to the research reflected in the themes of difference and memory in the current issues of Vectors. Topics discussed include:

• Is today's cultural avant-garde defined by galleries and auction houses, or has it abandoned them to inhabit other spaces?
• Can social memory persevere in an age of accelerating media obsolesence?
• Has the relationship among art, scholarship, and design changed now that the media for all three are converging, e.g. on the Web?
• How can we expand the production and recognition of scholarly research beyond the narrow paradigms of publication in academic niche journals?

[link]

6-7pm

This roundtable discussion prompted by At the Edge of Art features Sarah Cook, Honor Harger, Charlie Gere, Sylvia Borda, and other new media practitioners in the northeast of England. Discussion ranges from the function of art to the necessity of critical judgments to new media's dependence (or lack thereof) on the mainstream art world.

[link]

6:30-8pm

FACT new media curator Marta Ruperez interviews Jon Ippolito about the new edges of art in the 21st century and the antibody metaphor that Blais and Ippolito think best describe art's new role in this century.

Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool.

"The Edge of Art: Distributed Design"[link]

7-8 pm

Glimpse the cutting edge of digital design as professional artist and writer Jon Ippolito shares work from designers who build software protocols, peer-to-peer networks and activist communities, and get a demonstration of Apple applications that harness the power of distributed design.

235 Regent Street, London.

"Art at the Edge of Time" [link]

7-9pm

The average newscast these days is likely to report the outbreak of a new computer virus or a new technique for growing bodily organs. In an age when technology seems increasingly to have a mind of its own, art offers an important check on technologyÕs relentless proliferation. This dialogue between new media artist-curator Jon Ippolito and scholar Charlie Gere probes the seismic shift in artÕs role during a time of accelerated change.

The participants will draw on research from two books just published this spring. At the Edge of Art (Thames & Hudson), by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito and Art, Time and Technology, by Charlie Gere (Berg Press). Both books are available from the ICA bookshop with a 10% discount for ICA members. Art at the Edge of Time is part of the Man Machine Season

Nash Room. Full Price : £5. ICA Members : £4.

"Can Museums Evolve As Fast As Their Assets?" [link]

Preserving Your Digital Assets, Hyne Convention Center, Boston.

New-media artists who want their works to persevere have two diametrically opposed choices: to cast their work in traditional genres like ink or bronze, or to trust code to survive by means of its executability.

This talk examines an emerging field in which the contrast between these two alternatives is greatest: so-called artificial life, the creation with a computer of organisms that exhibit lifelike behavior and parallel experiments with animate 'wetware.'

Now, it's not at all obvious how to preserve art whose medium is self-replicating computer programs or E. coli. But these slippery media serve as a litmus test for two critical questions: whether static or dynamic forms of preservation are most likely to safeguard the future of art; and whether museums are up to the challenge.

"Artist As Researcher: A Boobytrapped Road" [link]

New Media Futures: The Artist as Researcher and Research as Art in the 21st Century.

Young artist-researchers beware! The road to research for the artist is inspiring but boobytrapped. Find out why at this presentation.

"Networks and Museums"

(Keynote speaker), Polylogues, teleconference with UMaine, Georgia Tech, University of East London, and CIANT/Charles University (Prague)

"Three Threats to the Survival of New Media" [link]

REFRESH! First International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology