Speakers

McLuhan (1962) suggests that the linking of electronic information would create an interconnected global village. Today, the term "Global Village" is mostly used as a metaphor to describe the Internet and World Wide Web. American scholar Howard Rheingold in 1993 first proposes the concept of virtual communities. Virtual reality allows a person to experience a simulated environment with the help of a communication medium such as newsletters, telephone, email, network service or instant messages.

Tencent QQ is a popular community in China which has become a supplemental form of communication between people who know or unknown each other in real life. With the platform of instant messaging (IM), it supports comprehensive basic online communication such as text, live voice or video calling, as well as online (offline) file transitions.

Using improved computing technologies and digital networks, information can be transformed, exchanged and consumed between netizens without space and time boundaries. In this sense, virtual community may play an important role in buiding up social network. However, cyber offences intensify public anxiety toward virtual world and lose social trust. Nowadays, criminals take virtual property as motivation to commit crimes.

This paper looks at how the affordances of the latest generation of location aware smart phones provide a platform for public location based art and proposes that the emergent field of locative art apps has the potential to transform site specific art.

The argument is developed through attention to specific examples of apps which employ a variety of approaches and techniques. Ranging from re-workings of the classic situationist derive to humorous virtual interventions in real space these projects share a common ambition to overlay real space with a recoding of space according to the logic of the artwork.

By using the Internet to promote themselves where users collaboratively create content, artists place themselves in direct contact with their audience and art world elites. This bears a striking similarity to public relations, which employs the same technology to engage the general population on behalf of corporate clients.
Artists employ Web 2.0 – Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums – to bring themselves closer to critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and the public. Now more than ever, artists are directly responsible for their public image, which is directly related to their online presence. Self-promotion is not new for artists, but engaging directly with the public and the art world is.
As varied and dynamic as art practices are online, all use the Internet to project their ideas, images and, crucially, their identities to the public. There are multiple approaches to artists’ engagement with the Internet:

Artists that make art about the Internet – where the Internet is treated as source material or subject
or analyze the cultural implications therein 

Artists make performance art using social media as a tool 
that use social media as a form of documentation in their work
that use it as a permanent log of correspondence

Artists who make work about the art world in which the role of the artist blurs with historian and critic 
 their self-published critical engagements with contemporary art 

Artists who present their work and opinions online, such as on an eponymous URL, and publicize via Facebook and Twitter.

There is considerable overlap between these, and when there is, it provides an exponential opportunity for publicity. 

Web 2.0 technology has changed how we interact with the world. Social media is used in presidential election campaigns (2008), to organize protest movements in Tunisia (2010) and Egypt (2011), fire employees, and even insite suicide. There has been a noticeable shift in big business’ spend away from advertising and toward direct consumer engagement.

This is echoed in art practices that engage directly with audiences in a participatory way: enter online performance artists. Furthermore, artists that address the art world and specific institutions or individuals within it generate automatic visibility with those institutions.

Art world professionals who have used the Internet to launch their voice into roles beyond their original occupations. A consistent voice of reason in the art world, art dealer Ed Winkleman’s blog has provided an ongoing forum for discussion. Art critic Jerry Saltz on Facebook has graduated from weekly reviews to direct daily interaction … Artist Jennifer Dalton immortalized the ongoing conversation on Saltz’s Facebook page with her 2010 graph, What Are We Not Shutting Up About?

By taking on multiple roles these artists, dealers and critics increase their visibility. Dealer as blogger, critic as social media celebrity, artist as curator or writer. These shifts are made easier and more public by the Internet. According to Skate's Art Investment Handbook, "Fortunes in art are made in the spotlight of publicity, not outside of it." The world of art is similar to the world of celebrity: visibility equates value.
The “Web 2.0” model has reassembled the unknown artist’s path to success. Artists use the Internet as an engine for visibility and publicity through self-publishing and personal branding. By interacting with the right critics, dealers, curators, more-famous artists on public forums, they gain visibility.
Online visibility may prove to be the primary way artists come to find recognition going forward. Is art becoming a PR game, each artist vying for greater publicity and celebrity?

During the final decade of the twentieth century, the rapid development of consumer-level 3D software engines, dedicated 3D graphics chipsets and the Internet provided the requisite foundations for integrating 3D virtual realities and environments into mainstream techno-pop culture. Sony Online Entertainment's 1999 release of EverQuest - the first successful 3D massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) - would soon entice nearly five hundred thousand players to collaboratively explore within a persistent virtual realm. The age of 3D shared virtual environments (SVEs) had arrived, and our newly-discovered love of the avatar (virtual self) would increasingly become a technologically and socially ubiquitous element within everyday life.

This paper will provide a historical overview of the rise of 3D SVEs in order to reflect upon the evolution of, and emerging possibilities for, virtual to virtual connectivity. The technical, social and creative developments of various platforms ranging from immensely successful commercial game systems like Halo and World of Warcraft to the newest generation of user-adaptable environments like Second Life and OpenSimulator will be discussed in relation to how they have shifted cultural awareness towards evolving digital lifestyles and opened new territories for contemporary creative practice and academic research.

It is between the simulation of the collapse of geographical distances and the discontinuous nature of network communications that we wish to explore the underlying mediation issues that constitute network music. The investigation is centered around three main concepts - place, performer and event.

By discussing the performative and compositional strategies employed in a selection of representative works , we aim at the development of a specific vocabulary for network-mediated sonic arts. This vocabulary must be able to reflect the central role played by the network in fostering new ideas and processes for musical practice, as well as the current archetypes in terms of multichannel sound diffusion, video projection and the role played by the performance space in network audio.

Until recently the video sharing site ‘Youtube’ carried the strap line statement 'Broadcast Yourself', but this phrase has started to disappear from its pages, and for good reason. After all, the beauty of Youtube isn't that it's an effective broadcast medium; TV and radio do that far better. Nor is it a good communication medium, which is much better exemplified by telephone, email, or SMS. Youtube is a social media, which is a completely different beast. Here we all are sitting in front of webcams right across the world, making our small individual noises, and through the mechanisms of collectivisation, specifically the Web 2.0 technology which drives social media sites like Youtube, these solo performances become extended operatic movements; currents of expression which resist categorisation and closure, including the closure of singular sense. Anyone who spends much time participating in Youtube will sense that ideas, thoughts, and images rarely stay the property of a single user, but take off on lives of their own, echoing through the contributions of other users across the connective tissue of response videos and comments, losing and finding origin and authority as they go. In other words, the processes one finds in operation within Youtube are completely different to those of broadcast and communications media, and are different again from the authorised connections of academic communities enshrined in the protocols of publication and peer review.

For the last 3 years I have been involved in making and distributing videos on Youtube. This work has surprised me in a number of ways, not least because it has found me becoming involved in the Youtube community, a community which may not be immediately obvious to the casual observer but for which I have developing a respect and familiarity, and within which I consider myself deeply embedded. Within this strange and idiosyncratic world I have made friends and enemies, shared intimacies and knowledge, and established a place, a ‘channel’, which for some reason over 7000 people seem to want to be connected to.

My channel, ‘The Conference Report’, carries some 1500 video that I have uploaded on a range of topics, but mostly around themes of perception, embodiment, consciousness, performance, and the life sciences. My videos typically attract healthy exchanges of text comments and also video responses from other Youtube users. For the conference I would like to continue my social media practice in that specific context. This would entail my acting as an youtuber-in-residence, making a series of videos from the conference itself based on the themes of the conference as they emerge through presentations and performances. These would be immediately uploaded to my Conference Report Youtube channel where they would be engaged with by the community of users I am connected to. Through this means we will extend into the alternatively connected environment of Youtube.
I have engaged in this kind of connected reporting practice before, at the Making Sense conference hosted by the Center Pompidou and L’institute Telecom in Paris last Autumn. The results of that engagement can be found on YouTube. 

During the last decade, cultural theory and practice have become increasingly enmeshed with critical discourses related to the concept of contemporaneity. These discourses, which have emerged as part of a continuing internationalized critique of Western modernism, persist in upholding the now well-established post-modernist view that there is no single objective representation of modernity, but, instead, differing non-synchronous representations, each with its own particular socio-culturally and economically inflected perspective on the trajectory and significance of historical events (“global” and “local”). However, unlike other critical discourses associated with post-modernism—including post-colonialism, with its deconstructivist invocations of third space and cultural hybridity—discourses related to the concept of contemporaneity have not sought to represent the current experience of (post)modernity as a pervasively uncertain one. Rather, by rigorously pursuing the notion that modernity has been experienced and represented differently in relation to differing, social, economic, and cultural circumstances, discourses related to the concept of contemporaneity have looked to extend legitimacy to representations of modernity that uphold the possibility/desirability of certainty as part of the current experience of (post-)modernity. As an intellectual framework for the differential interpretation of modernity, discourses related to the concept of contemporaneity can therefore be understood to have supplemented an established post-modernist critique of the totalizing perspectives of Western modernism by framing uncertainty not as a universal experiential condition of present (post-)modernity (i.e., the “post-modern sublime”), but as one possible way of experiencing (post-) modernity among others. In this paper I shall present a reading of the multi-screen digital video installation No Snow on the Broken Bridge by the Chinese artist Yang Fudong in the light of current debates relating to the concept of contemporaneity. No Snow on the Broken Bridge has been interpreted within the context of the international art world as an insistently hybrid work that performatively signifies the conspicuous indeterminacy of Chinese cultural identity as part of the unfolding experience of (post-)modernity. It will be argued that while No Snow on the Broken Bridge is open to such a reading, it is also possible to interpret the work as a localized attempt to uphold the existence and durability of an essential Chinese national cultural identity. As a consequence, No Snow on the Broken Bridge can be seen as a highly problematic work that, by acting as a focus for the simultaneity of mutually resistant points of view, presents us with an apparently insurmountable double-bind whose endless circularity serves to shelter the envisioning of an essential Chinese national cultural identity from the deconstructive effects of post-colonialist critical discourse.

Paul Gladston is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Visual Culture in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. Between 2005 and 2010, he was seconded to the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China as the inaugural head of the Department of International Communications and director of the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies. He has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art and contemporary Chinese art criticism for numerous magazines and journals including Yishu, Leap, Art Review, Artworld, Contemporary Art and Investment and Eyeline. His recent book length publications include the monograph Art History after Deconstruction (Magnolia, 2005) and an edited collection of essays, China and Other Spaces (CCCP, 2009). He is currently preparing a monograph on the theory and practice of contemporary Chinese art for Reaktion and, in collaboration with Katie Hill, a guest edited edition of the journal Contemporary Art Practice for Intellect with the theme ‘Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality’.

Creativity can be proposed as an activity of exchange that enables (creates) people and communities (Leach 2003). Creativity can be viewed as an emergent property of communities. Marika Luders (2009) observes that creativity ‘is now commonly understood as part of what constitutes human beings. Moreover, creativity is not necessarily an isolated phenomenon’.

This panel proposes to explore the question of collaborative practice among creative communities and collectives that are not situated in geographical proximity but employ networking and communication technologies in order to create (and sometimes, be) together. The questions we pose and that we’ll seek to address are:

Are distributed, telematic, networked, glocal, or other technologically enhanced communities/collectives creative in ways that are particular to the media they employ in order to ensure their connectivity (and thus, togetherness)? 

If creativity, in itself, ‘creates’ communities (Leach 2003), are all communities –either local, glocal or global- potentially creative?

What can be more defining of the human and his or her ascent to civilization than culture. We characterize history primarily with culture, the past as the domain of cultural heritage and the present in the framework of cultural markers, beginning with literacy, which trancends from cultural to social and economical issue. One development indicator nowadays extends to digital literacy as one of the common goals of contemporary human society.

Through creative processes, culture becomes an added value of our systems, a kind of metasystem. Information-communication technology (ICT) impacts creative production, education, science, arts. Various contents and tehnological possibilities in every day life appear defined by principles of knowledge, different cultural fields, various user-groups, and are displayed as global data.

ICT became a cultural and global phenomenom, helping also as life-saving system. Culture functions as a communication base connecting time and space, and the human as creator and inventor unveils epistemologic triangles: at a primary level: nature – people – culture, at a secondary levels: nature – energy – ecology and culture – education – technology, at a tertiary level: human – science – art.

New energy sources, energy conservation and environmental, information and other industries can be seen as creative by stating that culture is commodity, shared by every human and by all people.
Some examples of cultural economic impact and usage of ICT are cases such as the European-Chinese project, European Capital of Culture, World Book Capital, libraries, languages, internet usage, cultural productions enduring economy and building the framework for emerging 'green' thinking (creative) industries.

Besides study on Mono-, Multi- and Intermedia, three project case studies will be outlined: winning candidature of Maribor with partner cities for the European Capital of Culture 2012 as a project that extends from local, regional and national to European and global and Hallerstein art and science project, which was the only successful one in the European-China collaboration within the EC Culture Programme call for Cultural Collaborations with and in third countries in 2007.

The third project is X-OP - eXchange of art Operators and Producers, which is a gradually growing network of artists, researchers, operators, producers and centers with the aim to establish European platform for creation of art and exchange. With its places, spaces and user-oriented technological infrastructure, it fosters mobility of artists, theoreticians and executives. It is built to strengthen pan-European collaboration, common production and interdisciplinary approaches to art.

The X-OP project is evolving into a network of organisations, institutions and individuals from various fields, extending on one side into the global ASEUM – Asia-Europe Media platform. On the other side it grows locally from MBMina – Maribor Information Embassy and on the national level from M3C – Multimedia Centers Network of Slovenia, which is unique in Europe and in the world.

It is the Cultural Information Backbone of Slovenia – a non-formal network of centres, which connects digital technologies based on the principles of open society and knowledge society with culture & art, creation, innovation, education and dissemination of information. Through long term cooperation, the partner centres wish to establish and further develop infrastructural and information supportive environment(s) in relation to information technology and digital culture.

The aim of these entities is to establish multi-sectorial cooperation between organisations and institutions, centers, producers, operators, artists and researchers wih the view of developing ICT infrastructure, enabling quick broadband networks for scientific, education, culture, art and business environments, a suitable infrastructure for art production, research and interdisciplinary fields of creativity.

Culture as generator of the evolution and pure energy in the creation process. With creativity through development and with culture to (green) economy intertwining science as physical and art as meta-physical parts of our cognitive system(s) and environment / world / space / space-time continuum interpretation(s).

In the cultural heritage sector 3D scanning technology finds its primary application in documenting and reconstructing objects and structures mostly of simple geometry: bones, pottery, architecture or the landscape imprint of whole archaeological sites. It provides a more efficient alternative to the traditional practices of curatorial engagement used for this evidence such as drawing, photography and model-building; and it thereby yields considerable benefits for current curatorial practice and serves as a route for sustainable custodianship, reproducing objects in a non-invasive, quick and cost-effective way. It helps to protect the originals by making copies available for scrutiny and, in cases where individual objects are displaced from the site of their origin, to reunite them within their original context, digitally or in hard-copy. In this paper I examine the implications of 3D scanning technology and reproduction based on 3D scans in an area of particular relevance for the study of ancient Roman art and archaeology: Roman portraiture, sculpted representations of individuals, mostly executed in marble. Drawing on my experience of 3D-scanning two first-century portrait statues of the Roman matron Fundilia – one at the City Museum & Galleries in Nottingham, the other at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and both originally from the Sanctuary of Diana at Nemi in Italy – I begin by considering the requirements of 3D scanning and reproduction technologies, devised for industrial manufacturing processes, when applied to objects of organic and complex geometry such as Roman portrait sculpture. Next, and based on the 3D reproduction of the two statues within their original context in the sanctuary, I examine the ramifications of these 3D representations (and the potential to print hard-copies of them) for our understanding of the site at Nemi. I propose that these reproductions, both as 3D models embedded in a digital model of the site and as 3D print-outs alongside each other in the context of a gallery, facilitate a fuller engagement with the site and its finds than would be offered by traditional methods of reconstruction. First, they help to reunite the distributed parts in one place, which can be either of physical or virtual reality. Second, and more importantly, the cost-effectiveness of 3D scanning technology allows for a comparatively economical production of different forms of reconstruction – reproductions which differ with regard to the medium in which they are presented, employing mediating techniques of physical or virtual reality, or intermixing both. I argue that the comparison of these different reproductions serves as an analytical experiment in its own right, thereby turning 3D scanning technology into a heuristic method reaching well beyond the mere documentation of artefacts. It allows for reasoning by means of visual perception, to compare how the different reproductions shape our knowledge about the material and how they map interpretive insecurities; and to assess whether, in the interstices between them, grounds for fresh interpretation can be found. I conclude by summarising the benefits of comparative reproduction as analytical experiment for scholarship on Roman portraiture, in academic debate and with a view how to present it to wider audiences.

Bibliography:

Bažant, J. (1995) Roman Portraiture: A History of its History. Prague.

Evison, M.P. – R.W. Vorder Bruegge, eds. (2010) Computer-Aided Forensic Facial Comparison. Boca Raton.

Wind, E. (2001) Experiment and Metaphysics: Towards a Resolution of the Cosmological Antinomies. Oxford.

The study of intercultural musical transferences in networked Internet based improvisation serves as the starting point for the two case studies featured in this presentation. Entitled Distant Presences I & II [1], they were performances by the Ethernet Orchestra [2], a tele-musical ensemble of skilled musicians from diverse cultures and improvisatory traditions. They occurred in June and November 2010, linking musicians at the University of Technology, Sydney (AU), Kunstmühle Gallery, Braunschweig (DE) [3], and home studios in Londrina (BR) and New York (US). The cross-cultural instrumental make-up of the group combined Turkish oud and bendir, Mongolian horse fiddle and throat singing, trumpet, guitar, buchla synthesizer, drums, voice and laptop Max/MSP processing (“real-time audio interactive processing software”) [4].

The performances were conducted as unique events, in distinct scenarios, providing contrasting and original data from field-mixed audio recordings and informal post-performance discussions. Transcript interviews were compiled drawing detailed attention to instances of musical transferences between participants, highlighting interactivity in musical dialogues through a musicological analysis of melodic contour, range, pitch and meter. This research also adopts a semiotic approach where “metaphor” [5], and embodiment, act as signifiers for perception in creating shared “codes of recognition” [6], across musical cultures that are meeting for the first time. Correlations were made between what the musicians said in post performance conversations, and musical events identified in the recordings (i.e. a comparison of reflective thought and musical instance). The analysis convolves these two forms of data into a descriptive narrative of each performance, identifying key musical events along a timeline. A preliminary draft was forwarded to the musicians and responses were incorporated into the final description. This created new questions to which each musician qualified their responses until a “saturation of categories” was complete [7].

Improvisation is considered one of many disciplines within the practice and research of networked performance. As a vehicle for intercultural collaboration, it is unprecedented in its ability to facilitate dialogical exchange and learning across cultures. This presentation outlines the creative strategies employed by the musicians to improvise together as a dispersed cross-cultural collective. It highlights salient aspects of intercultural musical transferences and incidences of real-time learning as demonstrated in responsive repetition of melodic, rhythmic and timbral exchanges. The analysis is achieved through a framework of distributed cognition, presented and demonstrated with novel audio-visual screen based examples. In the context of “connected communities” the environment, instruments and collaborative strategies of the performers play a crucial role in the “cognitive architecture” [8], and construction of meaning within collective musical dialogues. As network technology provides distinctive opportunities for intercultural pedagogical exchange, innovation in tele-musical collaboration, and in particular improvisation, will be shaped by new methodologies that respond to this potential [9].

References

[1] Ethernet Orchestra. (2010). “Distant Presences” networked improvisatory audio-visual performance. [Online]. Available http://www.eartrumpet.org/research.html#distantpresences
[Accessed 20.01.2011]

[2] Mills, R. (2010). Ethernet Orchestra networked improvisation research and performance. [Online]. Available http://ethernetorchestra.netpraxis.net
[Accessed 20.01.2011]

[3] Kunstmühle. (2010). Gallery of Performing and Visual Arts. [Online]. Available http://www.blackhole-factory.de
[Accessed 20.01.2011]

[4] Max / MSP Cycling 74. (2010). [Online]. Available http://cycling74.com
[Accessed 20.01.2011]

[5] Lakoff, G and M. Johnson. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago University of Chicago Press.

[6] Cumming, N.(2000).The sonic self: musical subjectivity and signification. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, p. 18.

[7] Glaser, B. G. (1998). Doing Grounded Theory: Issues and Discussions, Sociology Press, CA, p.157.

[8] Hollan, J, Hutchins E and Kirsh, D. (2000). Distributed Cognition: Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research. ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol 7, No. 2 June 2000, pp. 174-196.

[9] Mills, R. (2010). Dislocated Sound: A Survey of Improvisation in Networked Audio Platforms. Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, June 15- 18, 2010, Sydney, Australia.

This paper introduces an award winning series of online interdisciplinary briefs led by Catherine McDermott, Kingston University, connecting creative industry students across China and the UK. In 2009 Dream Lab, a science/design brief in partnership with the Science Museum and the Wellcome Trust was delivered to 20 of China’s leading universities. The Dream Lab Competition Event in Beijing, organised by the project development team at the British Council saw 5 finalists documented at www.dreamlab.britishcouncil. In 2010, a second online project, Exploring The Legacy Of The Shanghai Expo, with China Academy of Art, also supported by the British Council was the only University event presented in the UK Pavilion.

The latest online project is scheduled for March 2011. Connecting Contemporary Designers addresses a challenge of crucial importance: How can we support emerging creative talent in the current culture of austerity? It introduces UK/Chinese students to new skills in online curating, sustaining international networks and developing peer to peer exchange through the new generation of web infrastructures and open source. The project will develop an online resource about the ways in which the respective creative industries have explored digital connectivities across the creative industries, education, teaching and business. First stage research suggests the new forms of presenting emerging talent already online: the online portfolio at www.iamnotanartist.org.uk,www.itsnicethat.com and design/art dialogues at www.ifyoucould.co.uk .

The online challenge for teams of Chinese and UK emerging curators and designers will be to create and sustain international networks essential for their future career development online. With the rapid development currently defining the field of digital technologies, it remains crucial for curators and designers to stay ahead in order to harness the most suitable technologies for their individual requirements, and effectively utilize this resource to their advantage. Connecting Contemporary Designers contributes to student portfolios and CVs and sustains the international networks essential for future career development. The project supports the practice of design and curatorial expertise and its impact on UK/China postgraduate community will include: the professional skills to interact with industry: entrepreneurial skills to build successful creative enterprises; experience of online team working; future inter-disciplinary projects and value in each other’s practice. Finally the paper will evaluate and introduce the bespoke online Kingston University Study space site for the project, an accessible space for documentation, feedback, networking and resources. Additionally it will include an outward facing Blog to support students in activating their own networks and contacts by generating interest before, during and after the time span of the project. (Examples see www.dreamlab.co.uk) This collaborative learning environment aims to provide both private and public spaces using a VLE (Studyspace/Blackboard), social networking environment (ELGG One Community) and synchronous video conferencing (Wimba). This will build on the bespoke Study space module developed for Dream Lab (2009) and students will be able to negotiate the specific tools used and the balance between public and private project spaces including: Public and private blogging for sharing experiences and reflection. Build student controlled networks and groups using One Community. Upload and share images, audio, video and other media. The flexibility for the Chinese and UK student teams to engage with the collaborative environment through their personal and mobile technologies and finally to explore the curation of virtual exhibit spaces.

The History of Advertisement Trust (HAT) exists to collect and preserve the heritage of the UK advertising industry and to make it available for research and study. In March 2010 the HAT archive and library launched the Ghostsigns online gallery hosted on http://www.hatads.org.uk. Ghost signs are the typically faded remains of advertising that was once painted by hand onto the brickwork of buildings. Ghost signs initially appeared towards the end of the Industrial Revolution in the later years of the 19th century and eventually became widely popular in the first half of the 20th century. Their use declined from the 1950s onwards when the economics of production swung in favour of mass printed posters and billboards. This paper is part of an ongoing research project designed to explore interactions in social networks - mainly through online ethnography - in order to define the emerging connection model, thus enhancing knowledge circulation and co-creation and “lifewide” learning. From Wenger’s paradigm of the community of practice, theorised before the epiphany of the Web 2.0, through to Gee’s notion of affinity space, mainly linked to an identified territory, real or virtual, the research aims at shaping the new social configurations based on active involvement in cloud-based collaborative spaces. The interdependence of digital technologies and social facets is assumed in the paper: material (information, artefacts, etc.) and social (practices, interactions, etc.) factors are entangled and cannot be framed separately. The Ghostsigns online archive represents an inspiring case-study: documenting over 700 digital records of the original artefacts in United Kingdom and Ireland, it has been built based on the collective contribution of over 500 photographers who have shared over 5000 pictures through a dedicated Flickr group. First findings corroborate the “Pareto principle” in the Web 2.0 participation: most of the uploaded photos were provided by a small percentage of contributors. Furthermore, the results of the research, confirmed by the Ghostsigns case, indicate that participation in social networks seems “liquid” in the Bauman’s sense and a “variable geometry” connection paradigm is emerging in the cloud-attendance. The Ghostsigns project http://www.ghostsigns.co.uk has benefited from the continuous development and implementation of a mix of Web 2.0 tools (Blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), involving a relevant group of interest for an initially two-year run, niche initiative. While the opportunities of assembling archive complementarities for reuse must be further investigated, the outcomes demonstrate that past and present cultural and social assets can now be preserved (at least digitally) and valued thanks to open source software, social networks and crowd-contribution. The analysis of the cloud-based applications and the contributors’ profiles and engagement factors within the Ghostsigns experience, pave the way to the representation of a reference framework for the creation of cloud-based and crowd-contributed archives, notably for local collections, open-air artefacts, minor arts and ephemeral heritage. Although crowd-sourcing is an increasing research area, the impact and potentialities of crowd-contribution for humanities and art appear still underexplored.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Barry Cox and Sam Roberts for their help in conducting the research on Ghostsigns initiative. The author also thanks George Kuk and Tommaso Leo for their precious comments. This work was supported by the RCUK’s Horizon Digital Economy Research Hub grant, EP/G065802/1.

Digital media have augmented everyday interactions. Over the last few decades, there has been in particular a significant increase in screen applications in public spaces, creating visual and auditory interaction spaces and enabling performative experiences as we interact within a shared space. Goffman describes performances in everyday interactions and proposes that they are shaped by the environment and the audience. The individuals give roles to themselves, and the others, and perform face-to-face interactions suitable for their assumed roles. Like space, technologies can facilitate interactions. How and what form these interactions take (and how “appropriate” they are judged to be) is determined by the affordances of the space within which the performance takes place. Mediated interactions are influenced by the people present, the nature of the space and the characteristics of the artefacts or devices through which performance is mediated. Increasingly, digital technologies allow interactions remotely between different spaces, which may at times seem to be reducing the quality of the individuals’ experience of place and shared encounters. However, the introduction of situated technologies as intervention in urban space may help motivate social interactions or stimulate new performative behaviours. What happens when two locations are connected across different cultures using urban screens? What kind of performative interactions do the visual interaction spaces support people to embody? Will this stimulate different types of social interactions?

In this paper we report on two studies we carried out using screen applications that 1) connect two locations and 2) deploy interactive interface in one location: 1) Connect two locations: In this application, the screen was used to connect two remote places across different cultures and locations (connecting Lodnon with Shen Zhen), using video conferencing technology. The encounters in virtual world around the screen become part of encounters in physical spaces and vice versa. The objective of this application is to explore the way users’ interact with others and also with the screen while focusing on the social and physical context in which the interactions took place. 2) Deploy interactive interface in one location: We implemented a simple application at the same location in China, creating an interactive interface that triggers people’s attention and encourage a playful engagement with the screen using optical flow algorithms.

We aimed to focuses on the visual quality and the relation to the viewer rather than the technology we use. Unlike in London, interactive interfaces in urban space are a relatively new idea to the presence of the local citizens at the location in China. As a result, the emergent behavior might take different forms and shapes using bodily expressions.

Through these empirical experiments and observations, we can start to understand aspects related to the emergent behaviours mediated by the screen applications in an urban complex. In this paper we discuss findings related to applying methods based on intervention and playful use of technology in urban space, and explore how people appropriate the medium and perform embodied interactions in diverse contexts. In both situations, the screen is used as a platform for generating emergent behaviors and supporting embodied interactions in public sphere. We describe these studies and discuss users’ feedback. Initial findings highlight criteria and strategies for designing an urban screen application that will enrich spaces, support social engagements and stimulate a high quality urban experience. We suggest that these generated urban experiences are strongly related to the characteristics of the space, the people use these spaces, and the activities that take place and the properties of the installation itself. In particular, we note the importance of constructing socially meaningful relations between people mediated by these technologies.

Is there a model that would be applicable for the movements through physical and informational space of a normally subjective individual? Are the two types of ‘navigation’ comparable? Could the theory of relativity, extended to the living person as well as to subjectivity, contribute an appropriate model?

We can consider that the mass of information available gives a structure to sensitive space where individuals navigate, analogous to the structuring of time-space produced by a distribution of masses where physical bodies navigate. The semantic and etymological link between individual and atom should not lead to a purely physical vision of human behaviour. On the contrary, it is by taking into consideration the autonomy of the former that we manage to differentiate between these two bodies, frequently considered to be inseparable. Whether intentionally or not, the individual himself determines the majority of the interactions between himself and his immediate environment, whereas the particle simply undergoes these. It is through a study of the relativity of this autonomy, as well as the multiple factors that determine his decisions and directions, that we propose to draft a model of the individual’s movements in an information space, whether this be physical (urban space, the museum or the supermarket etc.) or symbolic (data base, text or the Internet). It will be necessary to take into consideration the tendency – exacerbated by recent technological developments – to fuse these two aspects, the physical and the symbolic, due to the intrinsically informative character of the physical space and of the anchoring in space of localised information.

If the physicist’s test-particle (which gives an indication of time-space structure) is determined by fields of gravity, the individual is moved by information fields. Just as the movement of the particle is influenced by the bodies existing in the space that it moves through, the way the individual navigates through the information space is deviated by points of interest (POI) dotted around his space. The physical model, as formulated by the theory of relativity, becomes applicable to the individual when we apply a physical interpretation of the energy fields of forces specific to the information network through which this same individual navigates, taking into consideration their interaction with the fields of motivation characterising the sensitivity of living beings. The general theory of relativity provides a model that enables us to describe the interaction between an individual, capable of subjective perceptions and curiosity, and the space he or she moves within. This can be structured, using all the information that is available and in tune with one or several aspects of the individual’s sensitivity.

We propose to demonstrate how transposing the principles of physics to draw up a model enables a better understanding of the logics of movement and navigation: notably, how a variation in the motivational fields, which make up the system of the individual’s personal determinations, creates a distortion in the information space through which he or she navigates, diverting the individual’s itinerary in the same way as, on another scale, the itinerary of the body may be diverted. To illustrate possible applications, we shall see how this hypothesis enables the design of new tools to contribute to urban navigation through information. Many concrete applications in art, culture and tourism

This paper produces a framework for understanding so-called “Asian new media” as it sits at the interface between new regional geographies and new (digital) technologies. Much has been written in recent years of the “rise” of regional, particularly East Asian centers of media production and the intensified exchange across them. Yet if, as Berry, Liscutin and Mackintosh have argued, regional production is a “complex, conflicting and indeterminate process,” then the cultural and media identities that are produced in its interface must also be recognized to be contingent – dependent upon an ever-situated dynamic of media practices, transnational interchange and socio-geographic contexts. As this paper explores “Asian new media” or “new media in Asia” in this context, it looks at media platforms that have emerged over the past decade, including Siggraph Asia (its next iteration to be held in Hong Kong) and AsiaGraph (a set of trans-Asian consortia aimed at the design, development and education of digital media, art and technologies particular to Asia). It approaches these new media platforms as cases for inquiry into the indeterminate and disjunctive dynamics that have recently constructed East Asia as an arena for media production. It thus asks what practices, geographies and ideologies might be deemed to be particular to such “new” and “Asian” media in these contexts. And what fissures might be at play within these terms as they are articulated across the range of locations, institutions and cultural workers that converge under the umbrella of these platforms.

In this analysis, I argue that we are well served by an understanding of the region for which cultural geographers (and more recently following them, media scholars) have strongly argued – of understanding it, in the phrasing of Doreen Massey, in a “global sense” and as a nexus or network of intersecting entities global, national, regional, local or otherwise. “Asia” here is a dynamic locus of interaction and interactivity that is ever constructed, porous and transnational in scale. For scholars like Doreen Massey, conceiving of place in a “global sense” renders it open to more progressive possibilities. Her notion of a “global sense of place” was conceived as a model for laying bare the dynamism and negotiation through which places are constructed. Yet in relation to contemporary configurations of media globalization and regionalism, at the very least, we would do well to keep in mind the ways in which even this even this networked and negotiated sense of place can work in tandem with not only “progressive” but also simultaneously “progress-driven” ideologies. We would do well to keep in mind the ways in which the conceptions and practices of these platforms risk being confined within an ideology of the “new.” They risk being confined within a loop whereby the future of Asian production, no matter how dynamic or interactive, can only be engendered through a developmentalist and progress-driven discourse – here the development of new technologies. This paper works to address these contingencies

This paper identifies the significance of Digital Identities within the domain of the cultural and creative sectors, as understood from the perspective of creatives (individuals and collectives), mediators (organizations, institutions and businesses) and events (whether orchestrated or not). In all instances, Digital Identity refers to the semblance of emanation, voice, articulation and beliefs, typically disseminated via dedicated websites and/or profiles on social media networks. Identities are constituted of words, images and multimedia content, but also, importantly must be understood to manifest within a flow of virtual space and time.
The cultural sector has undoubtedly embraced online media, however this paper argues that stakeholders, particularly mediators, have yet to grasp the full significance of a ‘digital footprint’ – i.e. what it means to create, maintain and share one’s identity online. There are direct ramifications for the life cycle of discrete cultural and creative initiatives, but also more broadly in how we look to further enrich and sustain public engagement in the arts and culture. Paul Willis’ Common Culture revealed how the market made for a ‘liberating factor in the extension of cultural resources’. Two decades on, Couldry, Livingstone and Markham, in Media Consumption and Public Engagement, demonstrate how political and cultural activity must relate to proliferating media formats and a fragmented media audience.

The fact that art galleries, museums, theatres, dance companies, and publishers (to name only a handful of mediators) typically lag behind in their innovative use of social media can be attributed to a lack of understanding in how to contextualize information to suit a complex interplay of virtual platforms, virtual and real communities, and ‘localities’. Different platforms, for example, have specific rules of engagement, however, most social media training does not take these into account. Yet, with technology becoming increasingly user-friendly, accessible and ubiquitous the ability to set the right context has become key.

The paper presents insights from working relationships with various partners in the cultural sector, including projects with creatives and mediators in publishing, performance art, and the music industry (and in the different cultural contexts of India, N. America, Japan, and UK). In relation to which, digital identities are argued to exist within the following schema: hyperlocal, local, regional, national, international and anonymous. Engagements across online media can range from very immediate, ‘hyperlocal’ settings, in which there is a high degree of social and emotional proximity between individuals, through more formal, public and commercial interactions of local, national and international communities, to anonymous exchanges, often of a global, or at least indeterminate nature. Based on the varying factors of the ‘locality’ of any given digital identity and its relationship to other on- and off-line experiences and hierarchies, the paper questions to what extent an identity’s authenticity is important; how this relates to existing community engagement; and of its ability to act as conduit for meaningful experiences and interaction. More practically, the paper outlines how the tools currently available to us are already helping to construct sustainable digital identities. Thus, drawing on existing engagements with creatives, mediators and events, this paper offers a pragmatic approach to the use of social media in the cultural sector; and in doing so presents considerations for further theoretical development.

Despite the criticism implicating news agencies in subordinating developing countries to western ideals, aspirations, and practices, the business expansion of international news agencies has facilitate the globalisation of news production. Couple to that is the rapid development of new technologies that has changed media landscape and people’s media consumption. Internet portals are becoming an increasingly prominent news source reaching billions of people per year internationally. Globalisation of news production and consumption are changing the theoretical paradigms for evaluating the impact and dissemination of news content. Definitions of ‘news’ are evolving rapidly in the internet era and in response to the shifts in demands and economic power in the world. Relationships between and within global providers such as agencies and internet news portals are evolving as they engage publics under spectacularly altered conditions.

This research intends to examine cultures and practices within news agencies and internet portal sites, with a specific focus of interest on the quality and diversity of social narratives that the agencies offer by means of their news. The project aims to evaluate inductively the news production and aggregation across different cultures. In so doing, the research inevitably questions the identity of the ‘global public’ in contrast to specific regional and sectional publics. It compares regional variation in global agency content on internet portals in three regions: in Europe, America, and the East Asia, in an attempt to theorising tensions or synergies between regional and global interests.

The method was begun with the in-depth interviews with senior editors and managers from major international news agencies (such as Reuters and AFP) and popular portal sites (such as MSN). The study aims to focus on how agencies adapt to regional conditions, re-shaping their news, emphasising topics that accord with cultural. The findings indicate these pressures affect definitions of ‘news’ as seen by agencies and portals in response to new demands. It also suggests intriguing sensitivities to market changes, coupled to very stable core ethical positions in the face of cultural diversity that reflects some previous research.

Further, a detailed content analysis of three portal sites seeks to assess the agencies’ influence and visibility as the internet and digital processes reconfigure news distribution patterns around world. A crucial aspect of telling how news products are nuanced depends on how they are geared to local publics in their own vernaculars. This study uses the national languages of United Kingdom/America and China to unreal the possible difference across the East Asia, Europe and America. By analysing two more developed western democracies (without assuming necessary identity in their behaviour), and also taking a strong example of alternative media practices evident in China, some potential differences may be predicted. That also permits discussion of findings in relation to the varieties of media regulation, social backgrounds, technical infrastructure and market environment in regions.

While there is plenty of interest in online news as well as the role of agencies, little has been done on how the cultural product of news is selected and aggregated, and if it is re-fashioned when displayed on internet news portals. That said, consideration is also given to continuities of explanation to potentially critique the assumptions of the study, to reflect perhaps that factors conceived in some way as ‘culture’ are not on their own a useful variable to perceive how news is made, understood (by the producers) and disseminated.

While there is plenty of interest in online news as well as the role of agencies, little has been done on how the cultural product of news is selected and aggregated, and if it is re-fashioned when displayed on internet news portals. That said, consideration is also given to continuities of explanation to potentially critique the assumptions of the study, to reflect perhaps that factors conceived in some way as ‘culture’ are not on their own a useful variable to perceive how news is made, understood (by the producers) and disseminated.

The papers in this panel will address the challenges that the infinite archive poses to humanities researchers. How can we refine our theoretical and methodological approaches to suit them to the digital age?

The papers in this panel will address the challenges that the infinite archive poses to humanities researchers. How can we refine our theoretical and methodological approaches to suit them to the digital age?

Dr. Jo Robinson, School of English, University of Nottingham A Distant Reading of the Infinite Archive

Based in my work on the 'Mapping the Moment: Performance Culture in Nottingham 1857-1867' project, I will explore the ways in which Franco Moretti's concept of distant reading can be applied to the digital archive.

Professor Roberta Pearson, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Nottingham ‘Good Old Index’ or The Mystery of the Infinite Archive

This paper uses the BBC series, Sherlock, to interrogate scholarly methodologies in light of the infinite data offered by the infinite archive of the internet. The paper first attempts a crude mapping of the web to identify the most probable sites of Sherlock’s reception. Second, it outlines an approach to distinguishing among the interpretive and productive practices of the inhabitants of these sites, drawing upon Gitelman’s concept of the protocol. Third, it distinguishes between ‘old’ and ‘new’ web modes of practice. Some sites, such as Amazon, feature ‘traditional’ interpretative practices, while others play host to internet ‘tribes’ which have their own languages and practices.

Professor SvenjaAdolphs, School of English Studies, University of Nottingham

A Day in the Life of Your Language: from corpus to infinite archive

The development of techniques and tools to record, store and analyse naturally occurring interaction in large language corpora has revolutionised the way in which we describe language and human interaction. Language corpora serve as an invaluable resource for the research of a large range of diverse communities and disciplines, including computer scientists, social scientists and researchers in the arts and humanities, policy makers and publishers. Until recently, spoken and written corpora have mainly taken the form of relatively homogenous renderings of transcribed spoken interaction and textual capture from different contexts.

However, everyday communication has evolved rapidly over the past decade with an increase in the use of digital devices, and so have techniques for capturing and representing language in context. There is now a need to take account of this change and to develop corpora which include information about context and its dynamic nature. These corpora could potentially form infinite archives depending on the level and scale of meta-data included in them.

This presentation explores different ways in which we may relate measurements of different aspects of context gathered from multiple sensors (e.g. position, movement and time) to people’s use of language.

Nowadays, the words “network” and “networking” have become so familiar to us till the point that define many of our professional activities or the things we do in our leisure time. The developments and improvements of communication technologies have altered and expanded our communication possibilities while at the same time providing us with new tools for social interaction and creative exchange. For artists and their practices these changes have had implications not just in the way in which they relate to other artists, but also in their works. The aim of this paper is to look into some practices of the past, before the era of social networks and the generalisation of the internet access, which can be thought as precursors to more contemporary forms of art, activism and networking. The economic crisis that broke out in Argentina in 2001 did not only affect the political scene and its actors but has its repercussions in the art scene and its working procedures. The citizens’ participation in “asambleas” (open meetings) and debates was accompanied by the emergence of art collectives that show their solidarity with the social proclaims and demands. Projects like Compartiendo Capital, Projecto Venus, and Iconoclasistas make use of communication technologies and networking strategies to expand the concepts and traditions that regulate artistic practice while at the same engaging in political and social interaction. But if the crisis is generally read as a break with previous working strategies and traditions I want to propose that these forms of artistic networking and organisation can be traced in the practice of Mail Art. This paper wills focus on Mail Art in the seventies in Argentina as an antecedent to more contemporary forms of activism and networking. During the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) the practice of Mail Art worked, for many artists, as tool to avoid State censorship and to organise political actions and debates through the use of the postal system. Mi initial claim is that the working principles of Mail Art, such as continuous circulation, rhizomatic networking, formal/technical metamorphosis, and free exchange, constitute it as a practice of resistance in itself, according to the Deleuzean concept of ‘war machine’. Those experiences in the seventies can be read as the conditions of possibility of more contemporary forms of networked art created by the imbrications of digital technologies and creative exchange that focus on the production of new strategies and spaces of resistance in post 2001 Argentina. Following from here, my initial claim will be that the potential to resist, immanent to the practice of Mail Art, can be comparable to the critical aspects of these current projects generated over the new space of Internet in the era of post-autonomy -as proposed by Josefina Ludmer. Instead of using the canonical concept of work of art as unity for the analysis, I propose to work around the idea of artistic practice –which emphasises the creative process rather than its results as luxury commodities.

This paper describes one strand of work emerging from a project called Riders Have Spoken: Designing and Evaluating an Archive for Replaying Interactive Performances which is funded by the AHRC Beyond Text programme. Rider Spoke is a pervasive game a participative and interactive performance for cyclists designed by artists Blast Theory. The work uses Internet tablet and location-based technologies to provide a mixed-reality gaming experience for up to 100 cyclists. After an induction phase the cyclist sets off and for about an hour rides around an urban space. With a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet mounted on the handlebars, the cyclist listens to a recording of the artist introducing the work. The cyclist is first asked to find a location and record a message by giving themselves a name and describing themselves. As the game unfolds the cyclist either listens or responds to further questions. For example: “I want you to look for a flat or a house and find a window that you would want to go through. I want you to stare into that window and tell me what you see and tell me why you want to go through that window”. Further questions relate for example to spectatorship and to personal narratives. The final question invites the cyclist to make a promise and to speak this into the air. The game ends with the cyclist returning to the induction and handing the technology back to the organizers. Rider Spoke has been running since 2007 and has been staged at the following venues: Brighton, London, Athens, Budapest, Sydney, Adelaide, Liverpool and Linz. Rider Spoke Materials. The record of a Rider Spoke performance includes: audio-recordings of the Riders’ utterances, wi-fi, GPS traces and other in-game data. These materials have been supplemented with a range of video documentaries made either by the riders themselves or by an ethnographer, along with additional commentaries or trajectories (Benford et al., 2009) from multiple perspectives, e.g. artistic, performance studies, technical architecture (see Figure 1 for schematic). This paper discusses the implementation of a number of navigational techniques (Erickson & Kellogg, 2002) that support the visualization and restructuring of these trajectories or texts. Visualizing Conversation. (a) Revealing structure. Trajectories or commentaries can consist of long stretches of text that can be hard to navigate. Through the use of some simple techniques some of the existing structure of these texts can be exposed in order to make them more navigable. Each trajectory can be segmented for example into commentary relating to each Rider Spoke question along with any background explanation that the trajectory’s creator has added. Each trajectory can be further segmented into text containing observations and comments on a Rider’s journey from location to location. In showing these boundaries the structure already in the text can be made more explicit (b) Adding structure. The browsing and navigating of existing trajectories has also been aided by the addition of tagging and annotation facilities, and a search overlay (see Figure 2 for an example of annotation). Restructuring Conversation. Archival users may also wish to restructure the text, or trajectories. To this end question and transition separators have also been added. All of these facilities have been added with the intention of turning the Riders Have Spoken materials into a more navigable and hence usable resource.

This paper questions modes of listening; specifically it draws on the author’s experience as a performer listening in network environments. It thus ties into the conference’s theme of connected communities by formulating a concept of auditory engagement between people in virtual spaces.

The paper examines listening in as well as to the network. It is an extension to a text developed in 2009 (Schroeder 2009), and constitutes one specific way of defining a mode of listening as seen by one performer with one specific instrument playing a certain type of music. It must be understood as a culturally variable listening that Paul Carter has described as a listening that is “subject to the prevailing ideologies and power relations of a given place at a given time” (in Veit Erlmann, 2004, p.3).

In the course of the paper listening is understood as an embodied mode, one that is shaped by socio-political and cultural concerns, a discourse that recently has come under closer scrutiny again. Therefore, the author will touch upon writings that address listening in such a corporeal light (Born, 2010 and Voegelin, 2010 for instance).
By assuming a more phenomenologically-oriented standpoint, the author’s pursuit abstains from an objective apprehension of the environment to which one listens, and thus acknowledges that everybody hears and listens differently, and that indeed being in a place (such as the network) already constitutes a subjective interference, a type of ‘editing’ of place. The paper concentrates on listening in and to the network since this virtual performance setting sheds light on how such an environment can make us question our fundamental position in the world as well as our position to each other. Listening in and to the network as a performer has highlighted how the network makes one listen to oneself, which in turn has repercussions for re-thinking our relation to others. The network reveals various differences between the ‘here’ and ‘there’, between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, between ‘listening’ and ‘being listened to’, and it is these notions that are fundamental to the argument in this paper.

The paper draws on theoretical discourse by writers in the fields of music anthropology (Born, 2010), media theory (McLuhan, 2006), music psychology (Clarke, 2005), composition (Schaeffer, 2006, López, 2006, Atkinson, 2007), as well as the writings by specific performers, such as Pauline Oliveros (2005, 2006). It looks at how the composition and distribution of music inevitably question our modes of listening, an argument that will be extended by examining the writings of Theodor Adorno (1941, 1969) as well as the works by English composer Brian Eno (2006), for example.

Listening in the network, or what the author also term network[ed] listening (as it better emphasises the to- and fro complexity of the involved auditory activity) can be seen as an activity and an interactivity that not only shapes our perception of a musical work but, ultimately, performers as listening subjects themselves. Network[ed] listening requires the performer to engage in what the authors elsewhere call a “sonic flânerie” (Schroeder, 2009), a permanent move between haptic and optic listening, enticing the ear to be constantly zooming in an out of different nodes, acoustic sites and sounds.
Listening in the network exposes the body of the performer as particularly vulnerable and fragile. The fragility of the performative body in the network will be examined by drawing parallels to the Japanese art form Butoh (Kasai, 1999, 2000, 2003 and Kuniyoshi, 1991, 2004).

It will be argued that network[ed] listening is an ideal corporeal state for rethinking linear conceptions of the other as well as a subject’s own relation with her world, and that network[ed] listening posits listening as a corporeal and multi-dimensional experience that is continuously being re-shaped by technological, socio-political and cultural concerns.

Texts that will be drawn upon:

Adorno, Theodor and Simpson, George (1941). On Popular Music. In: Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences, Vol.9/ No.1.

Atkinson, Simon (2007). Interpretation and musical signification in acousmatic listening. Organised Sound, Volume 12: 2. Cambridge University Press New York, NY, USA. 113-122.

Born, Georgina (2010). Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135:1, 79-89.

Bull, Michael (2000). Sounding Out the City: Personal stereo and the management of everyday life. Berg Publishers.

Bull, Michael (2004). Thinking about Sound, Proximity, and Distance in Western Experience: The Case of Odysseus’s Walkman. In: Erlmann (ed.) (2004). Berg Publishers.

Chambers, Iain (2006). The Aural Walk. In: Audio Culture, Reading in Modern Music, 2006, Chapter 2, Continuum Press, New York, 98-102.

Chion, Michel (1994). Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Columbia University Press.

Clarke, Eric (2005). Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford University Press).

Connor, Steven (2004). In: Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Chapter 8. Berg Publishers.

Dahlhaus, Carl (1983). Foundations of Music History. (trans. J.B. Robinson). Cambridge University Press. Cambridge/London.

De Nora, Tia (2000). Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Eno, Brian (2006). Ambient Music. In: Audio Culture, Reading in Modern Music, 2006, Chapter 17, Continuum Press, New York, 94-97.

Erlmann, Veit (ed.) (2004). In: Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Chapter I: pp.1-21. Berg Publishers.

Gray, Louise (1998). Bang On A Can All-Stars: Music For Airports. In: The Wire - Adventures in Modern Music. Available: http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/wire98c.html [October 2010].

Hiltz, Starr Roxanne and Murray Turoff (1994). The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press (First published in 1978).

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno (1969/72). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Herder and Herder, New York. Originally appeared as Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947). Querido, Amsterdam.

Jung, C.G and Jaffé, Aniela (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (trans. Richard and Clara Winston. Pantheon Books Publication.

Kasai, Toshiharu (1999). A Butoh Dance Method for Psychosomatic Exploration. Memoir of Hokkaido Institute of Technology. Vol.27, 309-316. Available: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/butoh/itto/method/announce.htm [January 2011].

This thesis focuses on social networking service’s status and impact in the context of cultural imperialism in globalization. After a literature review of contemporary cultural critics and scholars, the study picks Myspace.cn as a case-study example, using its network statistics to compare with those theoretical hypothesis and assumptions, so as to prove if the new media technology nowadays are gestating a new channel of modern individuals’ self-expression, namely, a new way to gain self-identity, which has been a big riddle in the context of cultural hegemony. In line of this spirit, my three-part study seeks to explore such a new opportunity. It begins with a review of the theoretical tension among cultural imperialism studies and scholars, summing up the ideas of Raymond Williams, Edward Said and Marcuse. The first part also parses John Tomlinson’s works so as to understand the continuation and inheritance of “cultural imperialism” concept. However, my analysis of those arguments resonates more with George Ritzer's outlining of five dominant characters within McDonaldization process: efficiency, calculability, predictability, increased control, and the replacement of human by non-human technology. That also appears to be the very process how culture imperialism dominate expressions of self-identity. Then comes to surface the dilemma of cultural imperialism studies: the riddle of obscure individual identity in the context of cultural imperialism and its domination. The paper’s second part focuses on two cases of cultural imperialism, McDonalds and MySpace. The third part is data analysis of the two cases. It’s worthy of note that the structure of these parts – case studies and data analysis – has special connotations. This paper is a specific analysis of cultural imperialism which tries to work out a solution for confused people living in this industrialized global village, that, even while faced with such a formidable power like a sweeping and unstoppable globalization and hegemony of cultural discourse, there is still space for individual to be heard, to make a difference, and to achieve the inherent value of one’s personality. Using George Ritzer’s essential concepts of “nothing” and “something”, the third part analyses behaviors of 173 users on Myspace.cn, demonstrating that the more “nothing” contents users post online, the more attention and popularity they get. An internet rookie needs to conform to existing rules on Myspace.cn, editing his personal profiles in a way just like modern medicine using labels to define a new-born baby, in order to get on the platform. The more existing rules users accept, the more traffic they will draw. Such profile-editing is a typical process of sliding into nothingness, burying Web users’ individualities under standardized categories. However, when users’ online popularity grows to a certain point, they would choose to post more “something”. The more profiles users edit, the more “something” contents they would post. Through the self-nothing process users get the opportunities to express something which are indigenously conceived and rich in distinctive substantive contents. Thus the modern relation between the individual and culture is demonstrated. That is, the social networking Web sites are essentially a platform of virtual identities, almost free of charge and for users’ own likings, thus they offer a rare opportunity of unfettered self-expression for modern individuals who are constantly stressed by the imminent threats of personality elimination and the burdens of associating rules and social etiquettes. The advent of new media poses to bring forward a new trend of glocalization that's contrary to the culture imperialism dominated globalization. The latter blurs cultural diversity, marginalizing individual and national identities into murky obscurity; while, the new glocalization could turbocharge the diversification of indigenous cultures.

In this presentation I will outline a range of performances, including my own, which use new technologies such as, motion tracking, artificial intelligence, 3D modeling and animation, digital paint and sound, robotics, interactive design, and biotechnology. These practices present innovation in art and performance practices being predominantly at the cutting edge of creative and technological experimentation. In a variety of ways they link the sensuous contact that must exist between the physical and virtual. At the same time they transform perceptual experience and thus imply a reconfiguration of our embodied experience. They also reflect a certain being in the world; in short, provide a reflection of our contemporary world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Consequences of this technological infiltration are not without problems as we see our world change from day to day. It is my belief that digital practices as experimental artworks and performances both serve as critique and have an indirect affect on the social and political, though a redefinition of this term is certainly needed, in as much as they question the very nature of our accepted ideas and belief systems regarding new technologies. In this sense, digitized performance and artwork does what all avant-garde art does it is an experimental extension of the socio-political and cultural of an epoch.

In 79AD Mount Vesuvius erupted with devastating consequences for southern Italy’s Campania region. Most famously the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed, shaken by seismic action, buried under volcanic ash and overwhelmed by pyroclastic events. The loss of these cities was so complete that apart from punitive salvage operations immediately following the disaster the cities faded into folk memory until their formal rediscovery in the 18th century. These large sites with their high concentration of finds and emotive stories woven into the archaeological evidence over the past two and a half centuries dominate the region as a whole, with scant attention paid to the 200 or so other lesser, mostly rural, sites known to date to have suffered the mutual fate of their larger urban companions.

Early excavations of these “Vesuvian” sites were little more than treasure hunts with the archaeology being viewed as a “natural” resource, a quarry of artistic objects to be mined and removed for the enhancement of the ruling state and, in later years, a financial opportunity for landowners on whose territory finds were made. A case in point is the rural villa known as the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale discovered on private land in 1900, about 2km north of Pompeii. The villa was independently excavated and some 75 artefacts, most notably frescoes, were removed and the entire site reburied. The fate of the majority of the artefacts was to be auctioned in Paris in 1903, sold to the highest bidder and distributed amongst art collections and museums around Europe and the United States.

These unique and precious artefacts now form the linchpin of Roman collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York USA and the Musée Royal de Mariemont in Belgium. With finds so widely dispersed and their original context as part of a living breathing building now lost, these artefacts can only be viewed as objects d’artes, framed as pictures and placed in sterile museum galleries to be admired by the public and discussed by art historians. To attempt to physically reunite these artefacts within the context of the original villa is an impossibility, financially, politically and practically, and the opportunity to deepen the understanding of this site is lost forever to scholars of all disciplines.

The story of the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor is not unique to the Pompeii region, Italy or the world; the avid collection of artefacts from around the globe driven by the museum movement of the 18th century onwards has gathered artefacts together in alien countries, divorced from their cultural homelands and orphaned from their original contextualisation. While physical unification of such distributed artefacts is mostly impractical, advances in the field of computer graphics and interaction offers curators, scholars and the wider general public the tantalising promise of reuniting artefacts virtually within the digital domain.

In 2009 the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned King’s Visualisation Lab, part of the Center for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London UK, to undertake a tentative and modest project attempting such a digital unification of the known artefacts of the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor. This paper not only details and discusses the project’s journey from conception to completion but in doing so provides a case study of how such endeavours can provide “virtual museums” for distributed cultural heritage collections using digital technologies. It further examines the impact of how such projects can deepen and enrich scholarly debate and understanding of cultural material through digital research, in particular for cultural institutions whose physical artefacts are no longer present in their own countries.

The JISC-funded project Connected Histories (http://www.connectedhistories.org/) provides a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed digital resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British history (currently over seven million units of data). Through the application of a Natural Language Processing methodology it has created a non-intrusive, distanced tagging of the data within those distributed sources to facilitate more sophisticated and structured searching, allowing for searching across the full range of chosen sources for names, places, and dates, as well as keywords and phrases. Background information about the search results is delivered to the end user, and the user is also able to save and export search results for further analysis. An online collaborative workspace allows users to document connections between sources. The search facility is expandable as new digital resources become available. Early modern and nineteenth-century Britain is one of the times and places in history for which the largest number of digital sources is available. These have been created by universities, archives and commercial providers, and are accessed by tens of thousands of individuals each day. But many are under-exploited, and researchers are hampered in the way they use these materials by their distributed nature and the variable forms of tagging and structure present in each resource. Connected Histories provides the next stage in meeting historians’ needs by addressing the requirement to access historical resources in a single, consistent way; and in a manner that moves beyond simple keyword searching to a forensic and semantically-driven approach. 'Connected Histories' currently incorporates the following distributed historical sources:
British History Online

Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674-1913 

London Lives 1600-1800 

17th and 18th Century Burney Collection 

Origins Network 

Parliamentary Papers 

Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835 

Strype’s Survey of London 

Charles Booth Online Archive 

John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera

This paper will explore the technical, logistical and political challenges of creating novel ways of engaging new and different audiences with established datasets. It will describe how, as users, our understanding and expectations of search have changed and what technology can do to help us explore increasingly large and diverse datasets. The datasets accessible through Connected Histories include those that were begun in the 1990s, data in different formats and encodings, some sets with little accompanying metadata, and some which are densely marked up. This diversity presents unique technical challenges. For example, the Burney 17th and 18th newspaper collections consists of approx one million pages whilst the Parliamentary Papers contains over 200,000 sessional papers. Storing and processing this quantity of data is a logistical challenge, but it also provokes technical challenges in verifying and validating the results produced. Further, such data can present problems for search accuracy and consistency due to the manner in which the data was derived from the analogue originals (such as uncorrected OCR) and political challenges have to be negotiated concerning ownership, copyright (who owns search indexes derived from the data?), the perceived quality of the data, levels of access and routes into the data. Connected Histories involved close collaboration not only between the University of Sheffield, the University of Hertfordshire and the Institute for Historical Research but also with the public and commercial content providers. Connected Histories re-presents existing historical datasets to users in ways that are designed to enhance usability and sustainability. In doing this, it aims to create new communities of users for the datasets it provides access to and encourage new ways of working with the data. This paper will explore the practical constraints and challenges of achieving this and its implications for new digital humanities projects.

Creative process: from proximate to remote, changing shape, shaping change. This panel presentation features multiple voices revealing (at least) four perspectives on recent developments at ResCen Research Centre. Middlesex University, UK. Issues of proximity and remoteness, presence and tele-presence, the real and virtual have infiltrated the working practices and creative processes of the group, while also demonstrating that the analogue world retains a compelling appeal. The writings of the Chinese philosopher known as Zhuangsi, (c. 350-300 BCE) problematise the dichotomies noted above. The use of digital technology has often been explicit, a conscious use of technology in works such as Shobana Jeyasingh’s Bruised Blood; Richard Layzell’s The Manifestation; Rosemary Lee’s Remote Dancing; Graeme Miller’s Linked; Errollyn Wallen’s Yes (2011) and in numerous works and projects undertaken by Ghislaine Boddington, which will be discussed later. Today, arguably presence, proximity and even identity have altered, and the concept of virtual reality has allowed us to reconsider reality/ies. The presence of absence, as a key experience of each artist, appears to be more profound than the absence of presence. Richard Layzell will present and discuss issues arising from collaborating and engaging with fictional others, digitally and psychically, noting the origin and development of these concepts from the exploration of creative process at ResCen. This will refer not only to his (invented) collaborator, Tania Koswycz (see www.rescen.net/Richard_Layzell/cream_pages/cream_pages.html), but also other presences and voices that emerge in the artistic process, such as Phoebe Layzell, a historical presence and ancestor, and her fellow citizens only made virtual through digital research. A key part of the presentation will be Tania’s view of digital technology, including the Whose Data? (2011) project at Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol, her relationship to Twitter, and her commentary on Richard’s relationship to blogging.

Ghislaine Boddington will refer to the early Virtual Physical Bodies symposium (1999) and the Cellbytes dance and tele-presence workshops in Arizona and Middlesex (2000/01). Additionally, she will discuss the evolution of her pioneering work in tele-presence, tele-kinetics and tele-intuiton, through her creative direction of shinkansen (1989-2004) and body>data>space (2005-present) supported by ResCen across the years; which has ultimately led to the co-chairing of this conference. She will outline the extended use of tele-presence in both art (performance and installation), commerce, education and the growing day-to-day usage by the public, She will examine how this is transferring embodied knowledge of virtual physical blended environments into a much wider population and how this shifts the base of artist research into areas such as tele-presence and motion capture in 2011. The emergent hybrids need to be linked to increased creative sophistication in the public's ability to simultaneously perceive, weave and extend the blending of virtual, augmented and physical environments.

Professor Chris Bannerman & Kate March will share findings from the ArtsCross Taipei project, which will have just concluded on 22 August. The challenges and benefits of remote engagement will be presented considering questions such as:

Whether the most productive perspective stems from close proximity/physical presence, or remote engagement/physical absence, when observing creative process?

How do physically absent audiences connect with creative process?

How does the existence of non-physical audiences affect artists’ approach to art making in a global world?

How do audiences emotionally engage with events beyond their tactile reach?

A particular focus will be the use of blogging and social media in observing and mapping creative processes to a wide audience (whether proximate or remote). Finally, we return to the writings of Zhuangzi to contextualise the dichotomies of real and virtual, proximate and remote, and to locate the debate in Chinese thought and a wider timeframe.

As a movement practitioner who engages with social media, the aim of this performative paper is to creatively examine the importance of digital video in transmitting movement techniques from shared networks via social media, with particular reference to trace-forms that facilitate eudaimonia. With the events in America regarding the election of President Barack Obama and the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, social media has unleashed the political power of social networks, underpinned by its role as a tool for agency and change. It is my belief that with these indicators heralding the digital revolution, there is globally, a growing sub-culture where individuals practice movements from digital videos. Is this equally transformative; facilitating the sharing of embodied knowledge? This will be the subject of this performative paper. When considering social interactions with social media, practitioners are able to share and compare techniques in an attempt to inspire practice and participation; examples such as Street Dance, T’ai Chi Ch’uan and Yoga can be seen on YouTube, Vimeo and eHow among others; as well as, websites like Dance-tech.net and TED, where practitioners share interdisciplinary explorations with regards to theory, performance and motion. This will and is transforming the politics of privilege concerning who has access to techniques of practice and strategies for devising. Professor Robin Nelson’s definition of Practice as research, is an emerging methodological process for performance academics; this methodology places embodied know-how and performed out-comes of practice at the centre any research product. As a result of these emerging practices in social media via the internet, there are an increasing number of channels being made available for the distribution of videos with a research focus. The use of social media to decimated technical strategies and creative practice, straddles boundaries that define cultural, intercultural and transcultural movement expression. This makes the aspiration to acquire certain skills, which generates particular movements, culturally blind; of cause, one could argue that this has always been the case; however, there appears to be an acceleration of the fact. Desire to practice usually occurs with inspiration motivating us to engage with rigorous disciplined effort in pursuit of acquiring or developing technique; consequently, being tutored by a master in a particular form, can be augmented by watching examples of practice online. A key ingredient requires practitioners to engage with struggle; engage with what Artard defined as a theatre of cruelty, a process that embraces great effort and discipline, which accompanies the pursuit of embodied knowledge.The transmission of trace forms concerning movements that facilitation the practice of eudaimonia, have been part of an apprenticeship tradition with masters and their students, as long as we have had embodied technique to pass on to the next generation. In evoking an Artaudian concept of struggle in developing performance, I want to re-examine the concept of eudaimonia; a term that is usually translated as ‘happiness’ or ‘well being’; however, happiness and well-being are concepts that would have had very different meanings to Plato and Aristotle in Ancient Greece than its contemporary use today. The Yoruba concept of Àláàfíà is probably closer to idea of ‘Eu’ than its English translation to ‘good’ and with Orisha being closer to the concept of ‘daimon’ than its translation to ‘spirit’. It seems clear that to reduce eudaimonia to an experience of happiness and well being, is to misunderstand the importance of struggle in building eudaimonia, which may create periods of unhappiness in order to make us flourish as whole person a Yoruba concept known as Ènìyàn.

This presentation will discuss the Digital Dance Archives (DDA) project; an interdisciplinary project that is bringing together a number of dance collections for an online platform and which integrates a novel method of searching by visual similarity. The project has raised a several questions about what happens to dance objects of the past when they are recovered and made available online, and in particular, asks what are the tools that users will find valuable to aid the searching and organising of digital dance objects? The visual search tool is particularly novel as it offers an opportunity to search video across the collections by pose, gesture and sequence, providing results that can open up new discoveries for users. The presentation will outline the project and its outcomes, and will debate the questions that have emerged during the development of the Digital Dance Archives project.

Many performing arts companies face the issue of how to both preserve and make meaningful and useful their collections of moving image (video) performance documentation. It is commonly recognised that these physically vulnerable collections need to be digitally captured to survive. This in itself presents many problems, but arguably even more complex questions arise in considering how these videos may become a catalyst for new forms of audience and community engagement with and around a ‘living archive’. This involves rethinking the notion of the archive as participatory (Huvila 2008), social (Manoff 2004) and porous, embracing the evolving technologies and relationships of the Web2.0 (O’Reilly 2005) environment. Potential benefits for the performing arts include: being able to create dialogues with geographically dispersed audiences; establishing a platform for sharing the collective memories and knowledge of those who have been involved in the company’s performance history; enabling new techniques for repertoire development through interaction with the historical repertoire as recorded on the videos; and providing access to new aggregates of data for performance training and scholarship.

The Australian company Circus Oz is an internationally recognized innovator in contemporary circus. Its genesis in the 1970s coincided with significant developments in technologies for visual documentation: inexpensive video recording. The resultant collection, hundreds of hours of Circus Oz shows and rehearsals, offers a rich, multi-layered record of their history.

The distinctive Circus Oz performance aesthetic encourages a sense of shared community, of sometimes anarchic, carnivalesque participation. This paper presents the foundational propositions and early results of a new research project which investigates how Circus Oz’ culture and artistic practices can be augmented through expansion into the digital networked environment.

The project aims to prototype a ‘living archive’, proposed as a shared online space for creative dialogue on the history and artistic future of Circus Oz. It is testing and evaluating how the development and deployment of such a rich media archive may catalyze the creative participation of diverse users — Circus Oz, peers, fans, scholars and the general public.

The project necessitates an interdisciplinary approach, with a team of scholars and practitioners from the disciplines of media, interaction design, collections management, information retrieval and performance studies working in partnership with Circus Oz and its diverse community. The ‘living archive’ database, search mechanisms and user interface are being developed iteratively, in dialogue with the development of the community itself, building outwards from the core of past and present Circus Oz performers and technicians who have the greatest personal stake in the video images. Exploiting the inherent granularity of web video (Miles 2005), married to the episodic nature of the circus artform whereby each show can be divided into a sequence of skill-based acts (tightwire, hoopdiving, etcetera), the ‘living archive’ aims to facilitate the creation of virtual versions of Circus Oz shows, or parts of shows, by allowing the remixing of sequences from multiple years of performance video, as well as the connection of material from beyond the Circus Oz collection of video material (other video, sound, pictures, tags and textual commentary contributed publicly). The ‘living archive’, it is proposed, will become a space for the collection, archiving and performance of memory (Kuhn 2010) in which community members can attach personal narratives and other mediated memory artifacts to specific circus videos. Other users may be more interested in studying, comparing and/or remixing particular acts, either to assist in developing new circus repertoire (both for the company itself and for other circus groups), to critically analyse specific elements of the Circus Oz performances, or simply for autonomous creative play within the shared social arena of the virtual.

The current information age is often associated either with the celebration of a fully participatory online community that transcends national borders or with apocalyptic pronouncements on digital culture's postnational and globalizing effects. This paper will consider ideas of global belonging that emerged in the 1990s, and it will explore recent theoretical work which offers an alternative sense of the uncertain and anxious status of global culture in the wake of recent technologies. It will give particular attention to cultural theoretical work by, among others, Jacques Derrida, Herbert Dreyfus, Thomas Friedman, William Mitchell, Nicholas Negroponte, and Howard Rheingold.

Kutiyattam is an Indian dance/theatre form which has been designated as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by the United Nations. Despite the recent publicity, this rich art form is slowly disappearing, due in part to the weakening of the families which have kept the form alive as well as a dwindling interest among the aristocratic classes which sponsor the performances. With the intricate dance language involved in the performance, it can be difficult for newcomers to understand and appreciate the performance, and without new avenues for this theatre form, audiences will soon be lost.

The Kutiyattam Project grew out of a desire not only to preserve this Indian art form in the virtual space but to explore the possibilities of bringing this local theatre performance to a global stage. Working in phases, we intend to create the experience of the kutiyattam performance in Second Life, allowing users to walk through and participate in the performance. The first phase of the project, already completed, includes the performance space itself as well as the temple buildings surrounding it. These buildings allow Second Life users to walk in and through the buildings in a way which makes the experience personalized. Based on the conception of the game ego suggested by Ulf Wilhelmson, we believe that those who invest in the process of the virtual space will begin to think of the buildings in a personal way, allowing them to invest in the idea of a kutiyattam performance.

The second phase extends the avatar experience by further immersing them in the performance process. By creating a heads up display (HUD), we will be able to guide participants through the entire evening of a kutiyattam performance, which begins around 9 p.m. and continues till dawn. The various activities and gestures can be explored at the user's own pace, which allows for the exploration of the buildings without the pressure of attending an all-night performance. Through the HUD, information about the importance of the buildings as well as their function within the ritual performance can be disseminated.

In the final phase of the project, we intend to use motion capture technology to preserve several performances of kutiyattam. While on the surface we are preserving the performance, we believe there are deeper implications to these digital performances. The user can participate in the performance as both observer and participant, switching roles and experiencing all aspects of the art form. Through the investment in the game environment and their avatar, users will be drawn more deeply into the world of the performance, possibly encouraging the propagation of kutiyattam.

While our intention is to preserve the performance, there are delicate issues which must be addressed when transferring the performance from Kerala, the southern state where it is based, to the open, global network of Second Life. Kutiyattam is a performance steeped in Hindu rituals and traditions, and allowing anyone to participate in the performance opens the performance in a way in which it was never intended. How can we preserve the religious space of kutiyattam while also opening the performance to new audiences? Will our presence harm or alter the art form irrevocably? Our paper will interrogate these issues and investigate how the virtual performance can potentially hurt the art form and strategies for avoiding such issues. Through the creation of the Kutiyattam Project, we hope to demonstrate that endangered performance modes can be realistically preserved within a digital space which can also inform its continued existence in the actual world.

Tourism relies on mobility, and increasingly tourists are relying on the services available through their mobile phones. This paper discusses the potential impacts of new developments in mobile digital applications on the quality and nature of visitor interactions with local cultures. Smartphones have the potential to help form, bridge and connect communities in similar ways to social networks and the broader Internet. Yet the pervasiveness and ubiquity of Internet connectivity available on mobile devices, creates a range of opportunities and challenges when it comes to tourism experiences. Drawing on a large UK consumer survey, the purpose of this research was to understand how Smartphones are beginning to impact on tourist behaviour processes and experiences. Whilst previous studies have sought to understand the influence of online social media on trip planning behaviour, there is a gap in research on the extent to which mobile digital applications shape tourist experiences. This research sought to address this gap. Although the study did not ask specifically about the implications for the creative and cultural industries sector of the visitor economy, the paper draws out a discussion on the impacts for this sector based on an analysis of the range and types of applications currently on the Smartphone market. The creative industries have been at the forefront of the development of mobile applications to enhance visitor experiences, either in the context of museum interpretation guides or in Augmented Reality experiences. However, all the research in this area focuses on the development challenges and processes of deployment of the technology, and no studies have assessed the implications for visitor interactions or on the nature and quality of the host-guest interactions. This study found that owners of a Smartphone were more frequent travellers, they were heavier users of social networking media, and they used their Smartphone devices for a range of travel related activities including information search, location and directional tools and booking travel during their trips. The study also found significant differences in terms of the types of applications thought to be useful for potential Smartphone users compared to current users. The study provides many insights into travel behaviour and raises questions for further research on visitor experiences, cultural interaction and the use of mobile technology in cultural and creative industries.

Paul Sermon’s Headroom, exhibited in Taipei in 2006, inverts the assumption of the telepresent experience by inviting a viewer to become the performer in a room and interact with another viewer in the other room a time through a chroma-key mixer. This intimate encounter between the self and others thrives on an ambiguous doubling of physical reality and the Internet, which is mixed on television screens and in one’s own solitude at the same time. I argue that if this encounter, which joins the self and others, can be envisaged as a spatial implication of ‘interface’, not only referring to the connection between computers but also in the sense of communities. Moreover, in contrast to the customary conception of the self-other interaction that usually presumes the unchanging nature of a given individuality, I argue that since the viewers have multiple roles of observing, performing and controlling the causes and effects of the encounters, the interaction between the self and others can be considered the symbiosis between self and its doubling, the I-Thou correlations. Therefore, I propose the ‘I-Thou interface’, which refers not just to the inter-subjectivities between self and others, each as independent entities, but also to their communal bodily spaces, whether real or virtual.
I draw on the traditional Chinese worldview to examine the potential of Sermon’s Taipei experience in this work. The term ‘interface’ should be understood in the sense given by the traditional Chinese ‘co-relative’ thinking, which is to ‘establish dyadic communication or interpenetration between various pairs of polarities […] to develop intimate correlations between the self, the world and universe’. According to this view, it is through Qi that various pairs of polarities can be correlated with one another. Therefore, ‘interface’ refers to such intimate correlations and shared but rival spaces between the self and others.
It is believed that the issue of the private and the public is very ambiguous in traditional Chinese communities. As we can see, Headroom is presented in the way of overlapping layers of the human body, bedroom and empty room, telepresent space, television screens, the glass of the show rooms, and even the artist’s living experience in the city through unpredictable interactions between the viewers. Therefore the ‘I-Thou interface’ suggests the joining of self and others and their unmooring through the communal bodily space within which the ever-changing encounters and boundaries between the self and others take place.
Furthermore, according to his work diary, he says one of the reasons behind the work is that ‘the temples and shrines here are designed and constructed to emanate divine wisdom from the Buddha to the worshiper through an elaborate symmetrical display of surrounding lights and decorations that frame the Buddha, as a portal or gateway (and I mean this in a telematic sense too) to love and happiness’. This is relevant to his residency experience in Taipei that observes juxtaposition between the way people escape from the reality to KTV (karaoke) clubs, temples and the Internet, and the way people redefine their existence in reality. His words lead me to think that the ‘I-Thou interface’ is not only the communal bodily space but also a morphogenetic space that juxtaposes the tangible and intangible to incite people to continuously immerse themselves in the dialectic between the private and public.

Finally, I consider that the notion of ‘I-Thou interface’ suggests the pertinence of the traditional Chinese ‘co-relative’ thinking, whose ecological implications can be developed in conjunction with the spatial embodiment of telepresence.