Doors of Perception 2 Conference Day-By-Day ... The third day: Sunday 6 November
Conference Report: Sunday
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Sunday morning 6 November
Among others, Sunday Breakfast Roundtables featured Doors 1 speakers Gillian Crampton Smith, of London's RCA and McLuhan Institute's Derrick De Kerckhove, the Well's Bruce Katz, ID Magazine's Chee Perlman, Amsterdam cultural center Paradiso's Caroline Nevejan (Barbie Goes Digital and Seeks Byte), Dutch artists Paul Perry (The Nerds Shall Inherit the Earth) and Remko Scha (Action, Reaction and Interaction: The State of `True' Interaction in Multi-Media Systems) and Mediamatic editor and novelist Dirk van Weelden.
University of Brighton's Jeff Taylor (Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Information Studies) opened plenary sessions this Sunday morning with his Towards Domestic Heritage Multimedia paper. From personal experience as well as academic research, he gave account of the changing qualities of family (community) memory and the status of its relics.
Taylor was followed by San Francisco-based artist Lynn Hershman, who gave an engaging overview of her work, stressing especially the video pieces Virtual Love & the Twisted Chord. These feature-length titles bear witness to the changing technological and communicational conditions that both facilitate and threaten privacy and intimacy in new ways. To show her works at length Lynn Hershman and her audience profited from the Doors 2 presentation room's facility, where "The Twisted Chord" was shown.
Japanese cultural anthropologist and interactive media theorist and designer Shin-ichi Takemura from Touhoku University of Art & Design spoke on the influence of system concepts typical to the Japanese traditional home, on the design of the interactive multi-media network environment. His beautiful examples from traditional Japanese Culture and their placement in interactive media applications received much acclaim from the audience.
Independent Austrian new media consultant and expanded book specialist Florian Brody changed the title of his paper My Home is my Computer is My Home into My Home is my Memory and set of for an entertaining and well illustrated talk, in which he argued that the concept of home is not built on the place alone, but that the memory that holds the traces that are constitutive for Home is built by images of places and places for images. Home is no longer connected to the place we own but to the multistructural concept of where we perceive ourselves to be in this world.
Sunday lunch break was dedicated to an extra panel discussion on privacy and anonymity on the Internet. John Perry Barlow, David Chaum, Manuel De Landa, Caroline Nevejan and Mitch Ratcliffe, moderated by Mediamatic's Willem Velthoven picked up where they left of Saturday.
Sunday afternoon
featured MIT's Dean of Architecture William Mitchell as the first speaker. He presented his concept of Recombinant Architecture. First he gave an account of some collaborative student projects. Then he argued that digital information is a solvent that dissolves traditional building types and allows the remaining fragments to recombine in new ways. His upcoming book City of Bits is centered around this concept of architectural development.
Japanese NTT researcher Hiroshi Ishii showed idealistic zeal in his talk Towards Seamless Collaboration Media. His presentation was about the development of his ClearBoard, a Human/Human Interface, designed to facilitate telematic collaborative creative and research work in which a subtle contact between participants can influence decisions, like it does in a physical proximity setting. His research leads us beyond being there, to a collaborative practice that surpasses the simulation of presence in conventional telepresence solutions.
Pattie Maes from MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Media Laboratory introduced the audience to its future assistants Virtual Pets, Digital Alter-Egos and other Software Agents. Based on the observation that people are increasingly overwhelmed with all sorts of information and entertainment, Pattie Maes and her group at MIT got involved in building semi-intelligent systems, that can help people filter all this information and select items they are really interested in. As her presentation proved, she succeeded very well in programming agents to be both useful and entertaining. The so-called Ringo musical advisory program (try it: e-mail ringo@media.mit.edu, with `join' in the body), is just one publicly accessible example.
Doors 2 last speaker was artist and director of the Karlsruhe ZKM New Media Institute Jeffrey Shaw, who introduced his interactive installation art in all its aesthetic and research aspects and brilliantly acomplished the difficult task of closing a conference of such conceptual and visual richness.
