Month: November 2010

(updated after a nap and some tweaks)

The Media Arts world reminds me a lot of the cinema world, in the sense that hardcore theory, artists, and commercial producers are in the same room together. The theorists want to argue, the artists want to make you go hmmm, and the bizzy folks just want to show off how awesome they are! That’s what made the collection of speakers and topics today at IDMAA at Emily Carr University in Vancouver so interesting.

The first presentation I really absorbed was Stephanie Tripp’s discussion of the non-human raconteur. She basically placed randomization / machinic narrative tools of the new-media area on a spectrum with Surrealists, John Cage and so on. The idea that non-human actors collaborate with the author of a work by introducing uncontrolled factors. Reminded me of Chris Ghallager’s Atmosphere, in which he specifically mocks intentionality by making the viewer guess what motivates the endless panning action of a camera. At the end, we discover that the pans are made by a sail attached to the camera, blowing in the wind. Ha ha, and so much for intentionality, but what I think is that the intentionality is there in the construction of the random event, and so the attempt to undermine our faith in intentionality with non-human intervention in the narrative is ultimately just a parlor trick that, for me, falls flat.

Continue reading “Report from the International Digital Media Arts Association Conference 2010”