Digital Encounters @ Sabanci Univesity Jan 5 - 8

International Symposium Week from the 5th to the 9th of January 2009
Symposium Chair Dr. Lanfranco Aceti
Associate Professor in Contemporary Art and Digital Culture
Sabanci University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Monday January 5, 2009
Sue Gollifer and Paul Brown
3:00pm to 6:00pm Performing Arts Center, Sabanci University
Information Arts: Arts, Sciences and Technology; Is Interdisciplinarity Really Possible?
The session will focus on the issues that are raised by artistic practices which operate at the boundaries of interdisciplinary research. Contemporary visual cultures increasingly portray a landscape where technological applications, visionary artistic interventions in the sciences and scientific approaches to fine art research provide the framework for hybrid artistic and cultural practices that blur boundaries, making it increasingly difficult to define the fields of operation. Is this a new digital Renaissance or a process within which the arts are losing their aesthetic and traditional focus?

Tuesday January 6, 2009 Sue Gollifer 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm Performing Arts Center, Sabanci University
Curating Digital Art: From SIGGRAPH to Second Life
The history of computer and digital arts is strictly linked to the curatorial issues that these new media formats have encountered in the affirmation of a new aesthetic. Sue Gollifer, pioneer artist and academic who has curated exhibitions of computer and digital art for SIGGRAPH, will examine the conflict and conundrums generated by both the materiality and immateriality of the medium and the artwork. What are the successful strategies for curating contemporary new media? And what is the role of a print when it is extracted from a digital artwork, does it become documentation or an artwork in its own right?
Paul Brown 4:15pm to 6:00pm Performing Arts Center, Sabanci University
A Life in Between Art and Science: A History of New Media through a Personal Artistic Practice Contemporary artistic practices take for granted concepts of interdisciplinarity, transmediation and hybridization. The artistic and scientific exploitation of the creative synergies produced by intermingling art and science is a methodological process harnessed in media labs across the world. Professor Paul Brown, a pioneer whose art practice moved across a range of disciplines, will, through his own artistic practice, offer an insight into the history as well as future visions for new media.


Wednesday January 7, 2009 3:30pm to 7:30pm KASA Gallery, Karaköy
Paper presentations
3:30pm to 4:00pm Sue Gollifer,
4:00pm to 4:30pm Paul Brown
4:30pm to 5:00pm Lanfranco Aceti
5:00pm to 5:30 pm Selçuk Artut
5:30pm to 6:00pm Elif Ayiter
6:00pm to 6:30pm Selim Balcisoy
6:30pm to 7:00pm Ekmel Ertan
7:00pm to 7:30pm Murat Germen

New Media Cultures: Traditions and Changes in Contemporary Artistic Practices
Contemporary digital technologies facilitate encounters, representations of images and cultural exchanges. In this new landscape of digital cultural encounters, old traditions and new practices are in both conflict and symbiosis. The contemporary artistic practices reflect the socio-cultural landscape created by new technological applications, defying notions of discipline, borders and space as well as cultural restrictions.
Thursday January 8, 2009 Sue Gollifer 6:00pm to 7:30pm KASA Gallery, Karaköy
The Digital in the Gallery: A Conflicting Relationship?
What is the relationship between the increasing immateriality of the artwork and contemporary art galleries? Has the digital facilitated the production and dissemination of new artistic practices or instead homogenized the artistic landscape? The role of contemporary digital curators is that of providing both an aesthetic experience for the viewer as well as the guidance through the increasingly complex nature of information arts which by intersecting art, science and technology require the viewer to embark upon a complex journey made of scientific data, aesthetic theories and cultural referential.

Speakers Biographies

Sue Gollifer

is a Principal Lecturer in Fine Art in the School of Arts and Communication and the Course Leader for the MA in Digital Media Arts (DMA) and for the MA in Printmaking and Professional Practice at the University of Brighton, UK. She has been a professional artist/printmaker for over 30 years, exhibiting work regularly throughout the world and her work is held in major national and international public collections. Her primary research is on 'the impact of new technology within the practice of Fine Art'. A pioneer of early computer art, she has continuously explored the relationship between technology and the arts and has written extensively on this subject. Gollifer has participated on a number of international conference panels, and her writing has appeared in fifteen scholarly publications and refereed journals. She is also a PhD supervisor in digital processes in fine-art practice.

Paul Brown

is an artist and writer who has specialized in art, science & technology since the late 1960s and in computational & generative art since the mid 1970s. His early work involved creating large scale lighting works for musicians and performance groups (Meredith Monk, Music Electronica Viva and Pink Floyd) and he has an international exhibition record that includes the creation of both permanent and temporary public artworks dating from the late 1960s. He has participated in shows at major venues including the TATE, Victoria & Albert Museum and ICA in the UK; the Adelaide Festival; ARCO in Spain, the Substation in Singapore and the Venice Biennale. His work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia and the USA. In 1996 he won the Fremantle Print Award.

Lanfranco Aceti

works as an academic, artist and curator. He is Associate Professor in Contemporary Art and Digital Culture at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabanci University, Istanbul. He has written for Leonardo and Art Inquiry and his interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection between digital arts, visual culture and new media technologies. He is specialized in inter-semiotic translations between classic media and new media, contemporary digital hybridization processes, Avant-garde film and new media studies and their practice-based applications in the field of fine arts. He is also an Honorary Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, Virtual Reality Environments at University College London. He has exhibited works at the ICA in London and done digital interventions at TATE Modern.


Selcuk Artut

was born in 1976, lives and works in Istanbul, TR. He has received his BSc in Mathematics from Koç University and his MA in Sonic Arts from Middlesex University, London. Currently, he is teaching at Sabancı University as a full-time faculty member. His artistic activities are mainly focused on new media practices such as sonic arts and interactivity. His selected exhibitions and performances include Substairs Sound Installation (Istanbul Biennale, 2007), Improvhelsinki (Helsinki, 2007), Bares do Porto (Portugal, 2006), New Electronic Music (İstanbul, 2006) and Aldwych London Transport (London, 2004). He is also practicing as a professional musician, playing with a band Replikas (www.replikas.com) since 1998.
More info: http://www.selcukartut.com


Elif Ayiter

aka. Alpha Auer, is an artist, designer and researcher, specializing in hybrid educational methodologies between art and computer science, as well as conducting research in data visualization and the development of kinesthetic, biological and somatic interfaces between physical space and the metaverse in collaboration with computer scientists. She has presented both research and creative output at conferences including SIGGRAPH, Consciousness Reframed, Creativity and Cognition, ICAT, Mutamorphosis and Computational Aesthetics. She is currently studying for a doctoral degree at the Planetary Collegium, CAiiA hub, at the University of Plymouth with Roy Ascott. Web: http://www.citrinitas.com

Selim Balcisoy

Selim Balcisoy obtained his B.S. in Electronical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH) in 1996. He received his PhD on Computer Science in 2001 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). Between 2001 and 2004 he was Senior Research Engineer at Nokia Research Center USA, where he conducted research on mobile graphics. His research interests include Augmented Reality, Virtual Environments, Cultural Heritage and Mobile Graphics. Dr. Balcisoy (co)authored over 30 publications at refereed international journals and conferences, and has been granted one U.S. patent.

Ekmel Ertan

Worked internationally as design and test engineer on telecommunication systems and after returning to Istanbul, started a multimedia design company and taught multimedia / visual communication design. He exhibited photography artworks in New York, Diyarbakır and Ankara and created installations and cooperative performance works in several international venues. Ertan is the founder member of amber Beden-İşlemsel Sanatlar Derneği (Body-Process Arts Association), a laboratory and research-and-production platform on new technologies in art. Ertan was the curator and director of the amber'07 Body-Process Arts Festival in 2007 and amber'08 arts and technology festival in 2008 in İstanbul.

Murat Germen

is an academician, artist and photographer. He has an MArch degree from MIT, where he went as a Fulbright scholar and received AIA Henry Adams Gold Medal for academic excellence. Works as a professor of photography and multimedia design at Sabanci University in Istanbul. He has been invited to seminars, symposia and conferences like SIGGRAPH, Mutamorphosis, CAe 2008, CAC2, EVA-London’08, eCAADe, ASCAAD to lecture on new media, contemporary photography and architecture. Has opened over thirty inter/national (Turkey, USA, Italy, Germany, UK, Mexico, Portugal, Uzbekistan, Greece, Japan, Russia, Iran, India) exhibitions. Has received inter/national awards, mentions for work on photography, design and architecture.