Doors of Perception 2 Conference Day-By-Day Report ... The second day: Saturday 5 November

Conference Report: Saturday

Up to Doors 2   |   UpUp to Mediamatic Home   | .Friday   |   Sunday

Saturday morning 5 November

The @Home Breakfast Roundtables were a succesfull starter for the Saturday and Sunday. Discussion was moderated by such diverse speakers as Kresten Bjerg from the University of Copenhagen on The Virtual Home as Interface to Self and Society, Xerox Parc's Paul Duguid on Context in the Context of Home, Peter van Gorsel of the Meulenhoff Publishing House on Book-ness or the Illusions of the New Media, to Doors 1 speakers Bert Mulder and Louis Rossetto, or Marleen Stikker on the Digital City: The First Dutch Freenet and Mediamatic's Paul Groot on The CD-rom Home Interface.

Second Doors' first Dutch plenary speaker Dick Rijken presented a paper which was calledDesigning Experience and dealt with the central issues that he and his colleagues are dealing with in the interaction design curriculum at the Faculty of Art, Media and Technology of the Utrecht School of the Arts: the necessity to deal with change, with the shift from information to experience, and from users and systems to information ecologies, as much as the interaction designer's attitude towards these issues.

AT&T's Vincent Grosso talked about engaging the human mind through the "...most promising device so far..." -- the television set; engagement accomplished more successfully with Form, Color, Motion, Sound. AT&T's working definition of interactive TV, or RC (remote control) TV is consistently based on the "...Entertainment Power of the TV...", the information processing power of the computer and the communication and tranaction power of the telephone -- all rolled together into a new consumer experience.

Body language: does Ratcliffe (right) really trust Grosso (left)?

Skeptic Mitch Ratcliffe, editor-in-chief of Digital Media, in his Realities of Interactive Television and Telecommunications Networks sowed some well formulated seeds of doubt as to who a new consumer experience would benefit most: the consumer or the investor in new entertainment technologies and services. The road from consumption to production seemed like a long one in Ratcliffe's talk -- but the realization of equal bandwith in and out of the home emerged as a clear pre-condition.

A short panel discussion among Rijken, Grosso and Ratcliffe, on consumer and producer perspectives in networked culture, and on the contextualizing role of the interaction designer in shaping communicational environments, closed this day's morning session.

Saturday afternoon

The other Doors 2 Dutch speaker, critic and author of the 1994 Doors-launched Het Boerderijmodel, Pauline Terreehorst, took us to her farm (`boerderij') moulded home, where a loving and productive family lives its linked community life. She introduced her personal utopian critical perspective, aimed at the shaping of the house as an information processing environment, giving equal possibilities to close family relationships, and to information openness to global networks.

In the following re-introduction to the material world, by Domus Academy's Marco Susani, the smell of intimacy rose to still higher levels. Susani's account of our Sensorial Expectations of Home was witty and beautifully illustrated. It strongly reminded interaction designers that if we open our house to the virtual world, we should be able to build the same, deep qualities of the material world into our relations with that virtual world.

Manuel De Landa shifted gear with his Homes: Meshwork or Hierarchy? Drawing parallels with the emerging of animal territories, he emphasized the rules and (emergent) properties of self-organization, in an inspiring and very topical analysis of interactive creative force in different environments.

David Chaum's paper The Ecash of Digicash on his own Amsterdam-based company Digicash's Ecash cyberbucks, (software that facilitates untracable `cash' transactions in cyberspace), challenged the conference's understanding of anonymity and created an emotional discussion, mainly between Chaum, Barlow and Ratcliffe, on privacy issues. The short panel discussion did not bring any solutions within available time, which called for an extra panel in the Sunday lunch break.

Saturday Night

Doors threw one hell of a party where Local Coloured `snert' (pea soup) was wheeled in horse-drawn vehicles, fused with oysters and rollerskate-served spoons of caviar against the audio backdrop of a live Carribean cum DJ-mediated Tech music mix at 150bpm...

Later that night: Willem Velthoven on a chariot of pigs, finally content...


Pictures on this page by Wendela Smit

Up to Doors 2   |   UpUp to Mediamatic Home   | .Friday   |   Sunday

Last updated: 26 jan 1995