The program for The Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment (IE2005) is now online. It looks like a great mix of subjects (they haven’t listed the speakers unfortunately). I did plan to submit but I didn’t get time to finish a paper. I plan to attend though. It is on the 23-25 November in Sydney, this year. It is primarily an academic conference but as you tell from the program, it has a definate industry concern. Indeed, they are still looking for industry speakers:
[W]e are looking for industry speakers from the Australian game development community or from the interactive entertainment community to give talks at IE2005. If you have somebody in mind, please contact them to confirm their availability and then contact ie05@it.uts.edu.auÂ
The people I have in mind read this blog — so you are notified and invited!
In the meantime, they are running an informal talk about interactive entertainment design and computer games at dFactory on Thursday September 24th at the PowerHouse Museum. They are also hoping to run a few panel discussions outside of the the dFactory event. They’ve requested ideas for panel topics and panelists too.
By the looks of the program committee, this looks to be one of the most exciting ‘interactive entertainment’ conferences held in Australia for a while. I wish I was presenting!
Italy now has a representative on our International Cross-Media Round-Table (there isn’t one, but wouldn’t that be fun?). There is definately a cross-media researcher and practitioner in Italy right now. Max Giovagnoli is an editor and presenter at Blue Channel TV, he edited the Italian Big Brother and has 3 nonfiction books out: To Write the Web (Dino Audino Publisher, 2002), Web writing (Technical New, 2003), ‘Like thesis of bachelor with the computer and Internet is made one’ and the fiction Fire Wants to Us, Publishing Halley, 2005. His blog, Proiettiliperscrittori (which means ‘Bullets on writers’), discusses cross-media storytelling. In fact, Max is working on a book that will details his views on CMS. Very exciting. Max posted a lovely message about me and has recently taken up the discussion about different models of the corss-media universe. I’ve posted a couple here and will post about mroe soon. But check out Max’s blog and stay tuned for more info about his ideas.
The notion of cross-media storytelling is creeping into academic and art. A sibling concept, ‘distributed aesthetics’, is being bandied about at a few ‘spaces’. Here are a couple in Australia:
It has been widely argued by sociologists, cultural and media theorists such as Manuel Castells, Arjun Appardurai and Geert Lovink that we now live in a landscape shaped by the flows and traffic of globally networked information. We have become, in Castells words, a ‘networked society’ and our cultural, social and economic practices must operate within this global space of flows. The geography of place and history in which association through physical proximity and tradition such as neighbourhood, or through identification based upon race, class or sex, recedes to give way to information space. Artists have responded to this shifting cultural landscape by taking up the net itself as a medium for practice, by forming their own artistic networks facilitated by net infrastructure and functionality, and by critically responding to what distributed spatio-temporalities might mean for the art object itself, for art production and for audience interaction. Beyond the identification of an historical art movement – net.art – distributed aesthetics names ways of artistically operating in a time and space of information flows, and of engendering modes of perception specific to these flows.
In this issue of fibreculture journal, we are seeking contributions to the aesthetic and artistic theorisation, use and development of networked spaces, times and technologies. How, in short, has the network considered in its broadest sense contributed technically and culturally to contemporary modes of perception? Writers may approach this from the perspective of speculative, empirical, historical and/or critical theories. Specific case studies of online artistic practice, the use of ICTs in artistic community and collaboration, politics and networked aesthetics, and analyses of networked art projects are encouraged.
The Art Association of Australia & New Zealand [NSW Chapter]in association with the Art Gallery of NSW and the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, UNSW present the 2005 Conference: TRANSFORMING AESTHETICS, 7-9 July 2005, Art Gallery of New South Wales Sydney, Australia.
DISTRIBUTED AESTHETICS: HISTORIES AND THEORIES Anna Munster The ‘undoing’ of New Media Art: Towards a distributed aesthetics
Darren Tofts On the street where you live: stencil art and the poetics of ephemera
Pia Ednie-Brown Processual Consistency: a form of composition
DISTRIBUTED AESTHETICS: MEDIA AND PROCESS Andrew Murphie Distribution and assemblage in the work of Joyce Hinterding and David Haines
Susan Ballard Flickering and delay: materiality in digital installation
Sean Cubitt – CLOSING KEYNOTE New light: fragments and responsibilities