Thing Frankfurt Moblog

Received 20. 02. 2007 -- 19:13 from from the electric elch <= = =>

Fwd: Call for Papers: I4 / Interactivity / Information / Interfaces / Immersion

International Research Conference
J W Goethe University / Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European
Ethnology

Organized by:

Research Network for Media Anthropology / FAMe Frankfurt
(www.fame-frankfurt.de)

October 24–26, 2007

 

Even before the emergence of social software, web logs and wikis, it
was clear that digital communication technologies are, in essence,
complex social software programs with the power to change people’s
perception, the way people experience their environment, their ability
to abstract, their rules of trust, and much more besides. Whereas the
1980s and 1990s were marked by “quasi-social” connections between
people that occurred en passant, by strategies of urban artistic
“repurposing” (Digital Amsterdam), by a conspiracy of Internet-using
consumers, and by a user-based cyber society, the situation has now
changed fundamentally.

There has been a shift from technology-driven systems to media-driven
systems and then to user/project-generated content. As the empiricism
of the artificial becomes a global given, social, cultural, economic
and political frames of reference are shifting. Countless new and
unparalleled means of modeling social factors are emerging within a
mesh of agencies around the world. Digital natives – those who have
grown up with computer and internet applications – have spawned a
societal and cultural paradigm shift. Societal and cultural geography
is being extended by a global scenography of cultural artifacts.
However, this raises important issues concerning the logic of the
continuity of interaction, of a reliable and sustained presence, of
adaptive learning and abstraction – issues that have become social
markers in the programming, utilization, and onward development of
applications, platforms and environments.

/    
Increasingly, today’s designs and programs for digital worlds face the
challenge of delivering complex, multisensory, transcultural, and
global interaction capabilities in a robust technology-based
environment. The changes are creating a need for the explicit modeling
of human collaboration and cultural interaction which, increasingly, is
causing software production to move out of the high-tech niche of
computer science and media design into the realm of cultural and social
anthropology. At the same time, there is a growing need to know more
about the logic of construction (v. Glaserfeld) of culture and to be
able to apply that knowledge. The need for explicit and programmable
cultural concepts is moving closer to the science of the artificial as
proposed by Herbert A. Simon and echoes Norbert Elias’s call for the
scientific presentation of a developmental theory of abstraction.

 
/
Clearly, it would be wrong to assume that explicit, programmed models
for collaboration, the creation of cultures, abstraction and artificial
environments can eradicate the complexities of chance relationships,
interaction, imagination, fiction, routine, or forgetfulness.
Nonetheless, the possibilities they offer will be changed fundamentally
by the emergence of programmed worlds and environments. All over the
globe, artificial cybernetic spaces are something now taken for
granted. Computer technology is designed to be ubiquitous, and the
direct control of computers by means of brain waves is supplanting
control by means of a pointing device or the human eye. Presence and
telepresence, key concepts in earlier research, are receding into the
background with the advent of computer technologies which can be
inserted under the skin, into clothing, and into the eyes and ears or
can generate realities in their own right without which the frames of
reference of today’s and tomorr!
ow’s realities will become meaningless. Ten years ago, S. Jones asked,
“Where are we when we are online?” and J. Meyrowitz noted “being
elsewhere.” Electronic games, e-sports, and around a billion people
working in countless local area networks all exist in a vireality (M.
Klein). What are the living, communication and working circumstances in
these virealities? How should virtual spaces be designed in order to
provide sufficiently complex environments for perception, design,
decision-making, routine, trust, etc.? 

The > I4 < International Conferenceaddresses the emergence of complex
collaboration and community software.

/
We assume that all human sensory and mental capabilities and the
ability to abstract, conceive and implement things are, and have been,
involved in the development of human ability to use media.

The concept of media encompasses perception, abstraction, storage,
rules for the retention of information – of texts and holytexts, the
great sagas, manifestations of cultural memory – and progression beyond
existing knowledge paradigms. It is impossible to determine how
perception and interaction will impact on media, either qualitatively
or quantitatively. If the notion of a uniting organization is seen as a
selection method or principle, the weight of these ideas becomes clear.
They show that every form of interactive reciprocity is a selector and
that the uniting force of interactivity lies in the definition of
selection, distribution and retention criteria. This applies to
methods of hearing, reading, writing, tasting, thinking, making music,
and much more besides.

Increasingly, we expect and demand more from media – more information,
more breadth of choice, more freedom of choice, more world, more
closeness, more entertainment, more biography, more community: We want
media to address us, entertain us, inform us. This is about more than
consuming media. Our sense of reality has long since been subsumed into
a sense of media; our sense of reality is embodied in our sense of
media. We take the world presented through media seriously, we
recognize the reality of information; we trust the information and the
rules that make it credible.

The conference will be devoted to questions surrounding digital
environments and the technology-based generation of cultural patterns
in four areas:

 Interactivity / Information / Interfaces / Immersion

 
//

We invite submissions which explore these issues and offer answers to
such questions as:

What connections can we currently identify between software development
and cultural evolution? What significance can be attached to
co-evolutionary processes in perception, abstraction, forms of
virtualization, digital technologies and communication capabilities?
What kinds of virtual spaces are developing? How are digital
communication spaces influencing urbanization processes and the
architecture of buildings? What significance does game software have in
creating new social and cultural contexts? What kinds of cooperative
and collaborative processes are developing? What are the defining
properties of an explicit model of social constructs in a
technology-based media environment? How are means of digital
communication influencing children’s and adults’ living spaces and
interior architecture? How can a transition from the idiocy of the
masses and the knowledge of the crowd into a knowledge-generating
virtual community be explained? Can we see signs of an emerging virt!
ual civilization? How will network-integrated community building be
important in the future? How are learning and the structure and
legitimation of knowledge changing?

 
Please submit ideas for topics and papers (500 words max.) by March 31,
2007


Initiators and contacts:

 
Prof. Manfred Faßler
FAMe – Frankfurt/ Research Network for Media Anthropology
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology
J W. Goethe University
fasslermanfred [at] aol [dot] com


Dr. Mark Mattingley-Scott
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology
J W. Goethe University
scott [at] de [dot] ibm.com


Beate Zurwehme
Institute of Networks Culture/GENder Generative Economic Networks
(derivate)
J W. Goethe University
beate [at] zurwehme [dot] org