[artinfo] Disrupting Narratives at Tate Modern

[Mark Amerika]

Disrupting Narratives

Friday 13 July 2007, 10.0 - 18.30
Tate Modern Starr Auditorium, Bankside, London SE1

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/8896.htm
http://www.ires.org.uk

This international symposium brings together some of the world's 
leading media artists, theorists and researchers to explore real-time 
interaction in electronic media. Over the last few years network 
theories have started to shape our thinking about social and cultural 
issues. This event seeks out artistic strategies and art forms that 
engage with these ideas. Contributors include: Mark Amerika, 
Alexander R Galloway, Andrea Zapp, Kelli Dipple, Kate Rich and Paul 
Sermon.

Concept by Kate Southworth, developed in collaboration with Tate Modern

In collaboration with iRes (Research in Interactive Art & Design) at 
University College Falmouth

Tickets #20 (#12 concessions) booking recommended
Book tickets online at www.tate.org.uk/tickets or call 020 7887 8888

Timetable
10:00 Arrival and Registration

10:15 Welcome and Introduction (Kate Southworth)

10:30 Session 1: Counter-Narratives

Mark Amerika: Remixology, Hybridized Processes, and Postproduction 
Art: A Counternarrative

In this keynote address, artist and theorist Mark Amerika remixes 
personal narrative, philosophical inquiry, spontaneous theories, and 
cyberpunk fictions that investigate the emergence of digitally 
constructed identities, fictional personas, experiential metadata, 
narrative mythologies, and collaborative networks. Locating what he 
describes as the "postproduction artist" who engages with D-I-Y 
networking and alternative distribution schemes to build new models 
of audience development, Amerika will role-play the contemporary 
remixologist who is part VJ, part novelist, and part net artist, a 
made-up character in a book yet written, someone who uses the forms 
of new media not so much to counter spectacle in the media culture, 
but to create a counternarrative drift that moves away from the art 
object per se while investigating the depth of possibilities waiting 
to be discovered in the creative unconscious.

11:30 Andrea Zapp: For We are Where We are not: Mixed-Reality 
Narratives and Installations

Andrea Zapp's practice focuses on room installations in the gallery 
that are linked to a digital network, mostly through components of 
surveillance technology. At present she also concentrates on model 
and miniature aesthetics as a format of expression and narrative 
architecture; small or shifting scales become another motif to 
discuss virtual and personal spaces of memory and identity. 
Life-sized installations like a hut or a hotel room as well as 
participants are linked to their remote model replicas or online 
versions  to create surreal stages of viewer involvement that 
discuss the change of existence in a wired
world.

12:15 Kelli Dipple: ... duration, distribution and participation _ 
the performative-emergent narrative

Focussing on examples of contemporary artists' work, this 
presentation will observe a notion of performativity in context of 
cross-platform artistic and curatorial practice. Providing examples 
of emergent counter-narrative; demonstrated through interaction, 
participation, interventions and interfaces - that effectively 
penetrate an exhibition's mode, duration, functionality, and design. 
Technology is increasingly ubiquitus within all practice, it 
permeates interpretation, education, exhibition, performance, 
communication and distribution; it is sometimes therefore, difficult 
to tell where an artwork begins and ends. The fluid spaces without 
protocol dominate emergent narratives of New Media that engage both 
internal and external configurations of the institution. In order to 
redraw our expectations of what is possible, how are we able to 
imagine the virtual museum, the distributed museum or the online 
gallery - are they feasible platforms? How satisfied are we with 
broadcast!
   and redistribution as primary modes? How do we present New Media 
Art and make better use of platform-specific versioning in 
conjunction with social networks, to facilitate more detailed 
dialogues and provide more satisfyingly responsive cultural 
architectures?

13:00 Lunch Break

14:00 Session 2 Counter-Protocols

Alexander R Galloway: Counter-Protocol

In this keynote address, Alexander Galloway asks us to imagine an art 
exhibit of computer viruses. How would one curate such a show? Would 
the exhibition consist of documentation of known viruses, or of 
viruses roaming live? Would it be more like an archive or more like a 
zoo? Perhaps the exhibit would require the coordination of several 
museums, each with "honey pot" computers, sacrificial lambs offered 
up as attractor hosts for the contagion. A network would be required, 
the sole purpose of which would be to reiterate sequences of 
infection and replication. Now imagine an exhibit of a different 
sort: a museum exhibit dedicated to epidemics. Again, how would one 
curate an exhibit of disease? Would it include the actual virulent 
microbes themselves (in a sort of "microbial menagerie"), in addition 
to the documentation of epidemics in history? Would the epidemics 
have to be "historical" in order for them to qualify for exhibition? 
Or would two entirely different types of inst!
  itutions be required: a museum of the present versus a museum of the 
past? In this talk Alexander Galloway explores a "counter-protocol" 
aesthetic and how it relates to the contemporary landscape of 
artmaking.

15:05 Paul Sermon

My work in the field of telematic arts explores the emergence of a 
user-determined narrative by bringing remote participants together in 
a shared telepresent environment. Through the use of live 
chroma-keying and videoconferencing technology, two public rooms or 
installations and their audiences are joined in a virtual duplicate 
that turns into a mutual, visual space of activity. Linked via an 
H.323 Internet videoconference connection, this form of immersive 
interactive exchange can be established between almost any two 
locations in the world. As an artist I am both designer of the 
environment and therefore director of the narrative, which I 
determine through the social and political milieu that I choose to 
play out in these telepresent encounters.

15:50 Tea Break. Tea, coffee and biscuits are served in the Starr 
Auditorium Foyer

16:15 Kate Rich

Feral Trade (Import-Export) is an artist-run grocery business 
established in Bristol, 2003. The process is called Feral Trade to 
distinguish it from other methods such as Fair or Free. Feral Trade 
forges new, wild trade routes across hybrid territories of business, 
art and social interaction. Goods are run along social routes, 
avoiding official channels of grocery distribution in preference for 
a hand-carried cargo system, often using other artists or curators as 
mules. This distribution infrastructure is modelled on the 'store and 
forward' protocol of email, and proposes the surplus freight 
potential of networked social and cultural movements as a viable 
alternative to regular freight services (white van, supermarket 
lorry, Parcelforce, DHL).

17:05 Panel Discussion

17:50 Closing Remarks (Kate Southworth)

18:00 Drinks Reception. Drinks are served in the East Room on Level 7

Mark Amerika has been named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator" and has 
had four retrospectives of his digital art work. In spring 2000, 
GRAMMATRON was selected as one of the first works of Internet Art to 
be exhibited in the prestigious Whitney Biennial of American Art. His 
most recent book, META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, was just published by 
The MIT Press. A Professor of Art and Art History at the University 
of Colorado, Amerika's practice-based research methods have been 
translated into novels, feature-length films, museum installations, 
and live multimedia performances that integrate experimental music, 
live writing, and video sampling into the narrative mix.

Kelli Dipple is the Webcasting Curator for Tate, working across Tate 
Media, Performance and Adult Education programmes. Her role is to 
oversee live event broadcasts, curate a context for the development 
of Tate's Net Art commissions and to curate performances For Tate 
Modern's Long Weekend. Kelli trained in theatre directing and 
choreography at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia 
and has worked for over a decade at the intersection of new media and 
performance practice, specializing in the integration of visual, 
interactive, communication and network technologies. Previous to 
working for Tate, Kelli curated and produced digital media and 
performance programmes for Site Gallery in Sheffield. She also 
continues her own performative research, which has taken the form of 
site-specific and interactive performance, software development, 
personal data exchange and multi-screen or single-channel broadcast. 
For the past twelve years she has worked in the area of live!
   cinematic and networked events. Undertaking artist residencies and 
projects in conjunction with Virtual Platform (NL), PVA (UK), 
Montevideo (NL), Steim (NL), Interaktions Labor (Germany), The 
University of Manchester (UK) and The University of Florida (USA). 
She has also worked and collaborated extensively with artist-lead 
groups in the UK including NODE.London, Active Ingredient, Future 
Physical, Resonance FM and Furtherfield; as well as with Australian 
artists, Company in Space, Keith Armstrong and The Transmute 
Collective. www.macster.plus.com/gravelrash

Alexander R. Galloway is an author and programmer. He is a founding 
member of the software collective RSG and creator of the data 
surveillance engine Carnivore. The New York Times recently described 
his work as "conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely 
attuned to the political moment." Galloway is the author of Protocol: 
How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT, 2004), Gaming: Essays 
on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and a new book coauthored 
with Eugene Thacker called The Exploit: A Theory of Networks 
(forthcoming). He teaches at New York University.

Kate Rich is an Australian-born artist & trader. In the 1990s she 
moved to California to work as radio engineer with the Bureau of 
Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array 
of critical information products including economic and ecologic 
indices, event-triggered webcam networks, and animal operated 
emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau's work has been exhibited 
broadly in academic, scientific and museum contexts. Restless at the 
turn of the century, she headed further east to take up the post of 
Bar Manager at the Cube Microplex, Bristol UK; where she launched 
Feral Trade, a public experiment trading goods over social networks. 
She is currently moving deeper into the infrastructure of cultural 
economy, developing protocols to define and manage amenities of 
hospitality, mobility, catering, sports and survival in the cultural 
realm.

Paul Sermon is Professor of Creative Technology and leader of the 
Creative Technology Research Group in the Adelphi Research Institute 
for Creative Arts and Sciences, University of Salford. Born in 1966, 
he received a BA Hons. Fine Art at the Gwent College of Higher 
Education in 1988 and an MFA at the University of Reading in 1991. He 
was awarded the Golden Nica for Interactive Arts at the Prix Ars 
Electronica 1991 in Linz, and the Interactive Media Festival Sparkey 
Award in Los Angeles in 1994. Paul Sermon was artist-in-residence at 
the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in 1993; dozent for 
telematic arts at the HGB Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany 
from 1993 to 1999; and guest professor for performance and 
environment at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz 
from 1998 to 2000. Since June 2000 he has been based at the 
University of Salford, where he is researching immersive and expanded 
telematic environments.

Kate Southworth is an artist and researcher. With Patrick Simons she 
is a founding member of the art group glorious ninth - producers of 
distributed artworks, DIY installations and invisible networks. 
Current experiments into co-poietic relationships between code and 
ritual find form as aural-visual works, installations, performative 
presentations and texts, and expose their ongoing aesthetic and 
political attempts to evade systems of control. Recent works, such as 
November and love_potion, use magic, tactical gardening and social 
networks to recover knowledge of herbs and healing from commercial 
control and to share it as common knowledge. glorious ninths work 
has been exhibited in academic, gallery and online contexts. Kate 
received BA (Hons) in Fine Art and an MSc in Multimedia Systems. She 
has taught Media Art subjects at Universities in London, Dublin and 
Cornwall. Currently she is leader of the iRes Research Group in 
Interactive Art & Design at University College Falm!
  outh where, for the last five years, she has been Course Leader of 
MA Interactive Art & Design.
www.gloriousninth.net

Andrea Zapp was born in Germany and has a background in film and TV 
studies and creates disorientating digital platforms mixing real, 
virtual and online spaces, combined with surveillance interfaces and 
technology. She has edited two books, Networked Narrative 
Environments as imaginary spaces of being, MMU/FACT Liverpool, 2004; 
and New Screen Media, Cinema/Art/Narrative,
BFI, London/ ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2002, (with Martin Rieser). She curated 
StoryRooms, an international Exhibition on Networking and Media Art 
that took place at The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, 
from October 05 to January 06. She has lectured widely 
internationally; her art works have been shown at Siggraph 06 Boston, 
Ars Electronica Linz; ISEA Liverpool and Paris; Pittsburgh Center for 
the Arts; Festival of Visions Hong Kong - Berlin, Media Forum Moscow, 
Austrian Photo Triennial Graz, Museum of Image and Sound Sao Paulo; 
Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts Tokyo; Kunstverein Stuttgart, 
Intern. Art Fair Madrid, Film Festival Rotterdam; and at conferences 
including the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth, Australia; Siggraph 
Los Angeles, ISEA 02 Nagoya; Muestra Euroamericana de Video y Arte 
Digital, Buenos Aires. In 2005 she was appointed Senior Lecturer and 
Route Leader for the MA Media Arts at Manchester Metropolitan 
University.