I have been following part (only so many hours in a day!) of the discussion
and have found it very interesting.
I am an artist and educator in australia. I work in the area of media art
and teach in a visual art dept and a multimedia dept.
I will answer some of the initial questions raised drawing from my own
experiences:
Is (new) media a tool which reinforces people's creativity and how it is
expressed in terms of social behavior?
In many of my classes I introduce media art as a way of showing the range of
creative possibilities that have been made possible with new media. This has
proven to be very successful as it has inspired many students to think
outside of the square when creating work. An example: a class is introduced
to the simplest way (that I know) of adding peripheral input devices to a
computer. They are then required to create an interactive installation that
makes use of a simple input device, other than a mouse or keyboard, for
example a pressure pad. The range of projects that resulted from this simple
strategy surprised me, and the students were truly engaged in a manner that
I had yet to witness. They created unique works, and worked in groups that
seldom fell apart.
Is new media just a tool or an art form?
New media has provided an amazing array of new tools for artists and others
to work with. But as an art form, it is a very difficult one to define,
constantly in flux and embedded with the technologies that dominate our
cultures.
How are democracy and social connectivity via new media related?
My current project "peripato telematikos" <http://www.peripato.net> uses
mobile phones, the internet, walking strategies, and a custom web interface
to create collective and individual subjective mappings. The project has
been run in a number of workshops where participation and interest was
strong. Comments from the participants indicated that the whole process was
an empowering one for them. Technologies were demystified and made to appear
more accessible. The use of the mobile phone in these types of works, is
often an attempt to increase access to the creation of works through the use
of a highly ubiquitous device. Furthermore, through the creation of these
works social connectivity increased although this was not an original
intent; it just happened as a consequence of the way the projects have been
run. A paper outlining this project can be found here:
http://www.peripato.net/texts/paper.pdf
Are global and local systems two separate entities, or is it about one
place?
I find it strange that we are still talking in such binary terms. Given the
interconnectedness of the world at large, these distinctions surely must
give way to more useful terms. What are they?
Thanks
Greg Giannis [giannis.greg@gmail.com]
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