"I Know New Media Art When I See It"

The Art of Participation: Collaborative Mapping

Dr. Judith Rodenbeck and Trebor Scholz

Monday, May 16, 6:30pm

The Thing at Postmasters

459 West 19th Street,
New York, NY 10011

A lecture by Dr. Judith Rodenbeck and Trebor Scholz

Museum curators often frame new media art in modernist terms that attempt to
provide easy and familiar rules for institutional inclusion or exclusion.
Yet while many emerging participatory mapping projects can be experienced at
art festivals such as Transmediale, ISEA, and Ars Electronica, when it comes
to more traditional art institutions their validity as art is often
questioned. Emerging art needs new venues and old venues need a new
definition of art.This event takes two approaches to the problem. One is to probe the
aesthetic criteria on which institutions base their decisions about
constantly shifting shape of new media art projects; the other is to explore
a partial genealogy for collaborative mapping projects. Since the 1960s the
notion of simple physical participation has increasingly been supplemented
by more media-based and technologically mediated interactivity. An art
historical line from Marcel Duchamp's nominalist interventions into the
spaces of display idea to the participatory projects of the 1960s, routed
through the open forms advocated by John Cage and Umberto Eco, can be traced
in the background of collaborative mapping projects.

The open access flow of information in participatory mapping projects
constitutes an aesthetics that has the potential to reverse engineer the
original military purposes of networked technologies. Locative
techno-creative projects contrast the hierarchical organization of the
military command-control-communication model and the commercial hard sell
with online models of urban sites annotated and updated collectively by a
multiplicity of the people who actually inhabit them. This gesture is
similar to that behind the creation of the virtual city De Digitale Stad in
Amsterdam in the 90s and other collaborative networked authoring projects.

About:

Judith Rodenbeck is an art historian whose work concentrates on intermedia
and time-based practices of the 1960s. She is currently chair of the
Division of Visual Culture at Sarah Lawrence College.

Judith Rodenbeck

Trebor Scholz is a media artist whose current practice includes the
organization of conferences, publications, online forums, and mailing lists
and research networks as well writing about collaborative new media art,
mapping and education. He is assistant professor and researcher at the
Department of Media Study (SUNY at Buffalo), and founder of the Institute
for Distributed Creativity. A book The Art of Online Collaboration is
forthcoming with Autonomedia (eds. Lovink/Scholz).

New Media Education

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