June LASER Event

Schedule:

6:45pm-7pm: Socializing/networking.

7pm - 7:25pm: Renetta Sitoy (artist) on "The Internet as Media"

Employing a range of strategies for acquiring, organizing, and re-contextualizing information found on the World Wide Web; exploring themes such as online communities (in which participants communicate through mediated, self-defined personas), "cyber-stalking," as well as using the Internet as a means of self-discovery and recollecting personal histories.

7:25-7:50pm: Javier Ideami (filmmaker) on "Art & Tech: From Fiction to Fact and All the Way Back"

Transforming technological reality and fact into artistic fiction and using artistic fiction to suggest new possibilities in technology. Javier Ideami has often used technology to enable his art, transforming technological reality and fact into artistic fiction and at the same time has been using art to suggest new possibilities in technology and science creating the potential to transform what today is a fiction into a fact of tomorrow. This same process has brought together art and technology throughout history. In this talk Ideami describes this process through one of his latest films, The Weight of Light. In this film current digital technology enables ideami to simulate demonstrations of millions of virtual characters and at the same time the artistic fiction in the film suggests a new type of technology that today is fiction but one day may become real technology able to transform the stress of people into useful energy. In the same project Ideami combines very simple antique technology (Edison type bulbs) to suggest a new potential future technology (transforming the stress of people into useful energy) and uses complex current technology (green screen shooting + digital compositing) to recreate very real events of today (massive demonstrations of people). Fiction and Fact are not only two sides of the same coin in the interlocked reality of art and tech but they can at any time switch and become the other. Artistic fiction can become technological fact and tech facts can serve as the seed, as the base to project new artistic fictions which in turn can end up becoming a new technology in the future. The talk will end reflecting about the present and future of visual media in connection with photography and filmmaking.

7:50-8:05: BREAK

Before or after the break, anyone in the audience currently working within the intersections of art and science will have 30 seconds to share their work. Please present your work as a teaser so that those who are interested can seek you out during social time following the event.

8:05-8:30pm: Abigail De Kosnik (Berkeley Center for New Media) on "Fan Fiction Archives and the Evolution of User Experience"

Fan fiction archives act as records of media consumers' interests in different historical moments. How do we use the Internet as a technology for remembering, especially for storing and retrieving, or "recollecting," memories of our passions and enthusiasms? How do we remember the Internet? That is, as online User Interfaces (UI) and User Experiences (UX) change - which they have done rapidly since the dawn of the World Wide Web in 1991 - modes of Internet use that are normal, even second-nature, for us, become forgotten. Updates of operating systems, new versions of browsers, site re-designs, and new platform launches constantly alter how we approach and navigate the Internet, as well as what we desire to do with it and what we feel we need it to do. How can scholars record the progression of our methods of interaction with the Web when we tend to be amnesiac about specific network technologies as soon as they become pass‚? I am seeking to answer these questions by researching one type of Web site, the Internet fan fiction archive. "Fan fiction," or "fanfic," refers to original stories authored by fans of specific media products, such as films, television programs, rock bands, novels, and comic books. In fanfic stories, fans appropriate characters from their favorite cultural texts, and situate the "borrowed" characters in scenarios of their invention. Internet fan fiction archives are sites created to collect and index fan-authored stories. Such sites have existed on the Internet since the early 1990s and have grown in popularity steadily since then, but have evolved greatly in front-end design and back-end structure. Since fan fiction archives were among the first Web sites created, they are ideal objects of investigation for my study, as I can document the shifts in the sites' formats and features from the start of the Web to the present day. Also, Internet fanfic archives are memory sites. Fans archive their stories so that other fans can find and retrieve them easily, days or weeks or even years after the stories were first posted online. Fan fiction archives therefore act as records of media consumers' interests in different historical moments. From these archives, we can see what media properties inspired fannish levels of enthusiasm, what storylines and characters prompted the most textual productivity from fans, and what aspects of fictional universes were the most frequently explored in fans' stories, over the past twenty years. I believe that exploring these sites today will yield insights into how we use digital networks as technologies for safeguarding and remembering our affective investments in cultural texts.

8:30pm-8:55pm: Luciano Chessa (San Francisco Conservatory) on "Futurist Art for the Present Future"

Music compositions inspired by his research on the work of futurist Luigi Russolo, the creator of "The Art of Noises" and pioneer of musical synthesis.