BREAKING THE GAME SYMPOSIUM
From March 15 - 25, 2006 digital artist Thomas Soetens (Workspace
Unlimited), architect Kora Van den Bulcke (Workspace Unlimited), and
New York curator/producer Wayne Ashley present Breaking the Game
Symposium, a free online event that brings together competing
theorists and practitioners to debate and reflect on virtual worlds,
computer gaming, immersive technologies, and new possibilities for
artistic practice and experience.
For more information and registration visit: (http://www.workspace-
unlimited.org/breakingthegame).
The symposium will open up the art of game modification to the
contingencies of everyday life, where interactive technologies
increasingly mediate physical spaces and human movements in very
complex and dynamic ways. Participants will consider gaming and other
virtual technologies in relationship to building and designing
cities, navigating and experiencing urban life, constructing
identities, and creating and maintaining social interaction. We
encourage participation through multiple formats including text,
video interviews, phone blogging, images, animation, and virtual
walkthroughs.
Breaking the Game symposium has three themes:
“Hybridity” considers new forms of art being produced withi=
n the
increasingly hybrid environment of digital and physical space, in
response to the multiplication of delivery systems and formats, and
to the changing roles of artists, scientists, and technologists. We
will discuss whether or not, and under what conditions these hybrid
contexts are effecting how we produce, with whom we collaborate, and
with what results. How are we consuming art differently and
integrating it into our lives in new ways? Finally we will explore a
variety of hybrid experiments artists are undertaking within the now
established field of video gaming and multiuser virtual environments.
“Overclocking the City” proposes that we look at gaming =
technologies and culture as storehouses of tools for designing new
perceptual experiences and social interaction within the built
environment. We will debate what it means to have a public space in
an electronically networked virtual world, and what forms this space
might take. We’ll consider how virtual worlds, which for the most=
part, have been designed as autonomous environments, might have a
functioning relationship with actual places, buildings, and people in
physical locations.
“The Virtual as Interface to Self and Society” explores th=
e
continuing and expanding importance technologies of sensing,
computation, and display have in how we connect to society and
simultaneously engage in acts of self-reflection and self-fashioning.
Virtual worlds, and particularly networked pervasive 3D environments,
are great contexts for imaginatively exploring how we project our so-
called self into computerized space, reconstruct it in digital form,
and set about interacting with other reconstructed selves. In
combination with "computer software programs, rules, commands, and
networked interactivity" we perform a sense of presence to others by
manipulating "graphical, textual, navigational, and audio modes that
are coded to correspond with our bodily senses" (Bolter). How is this
self-presence achieved, to what ends, and with what effects?
Organized by Workspace Unlimited (http://www.workspace-unlimited.org)
Partners: Society for Art & Technology in Montreal, V2_Institute for
the Unstable Media in Rotterdam and the Vooruit Kunstencentrum in Ghent.
Supported by: Vlaamse Gemeenschap and Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds of
Belgium.
_______________________________
Wayne Ashley
Independent Curator
Media Arts, Technology, Performance
Tel. +1 917-803-4420
Skype: wayneashley
Aim: zevluvxx
New Version to Post! Thanks. Older version had a cutoff sentence
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Type: discussion