Collaboration and New Media / SnowCrash of the Flesh

Collaboration and New Media / SnowCrash of the Flesh

Multimodal Presentation/Performance

In Conjunction with College Art Association New Media Caucus 2007

NYC/Second Life/Worldwide Nets

Contact: Patrick Lichty

plichty@colum.edu

www.voyd.com

YIM patlichty

Skype patlichty

CONTEXT:

For the Feb. 14, 2007 New Media Caucus panel of the College Art Association in NYC, Patrick Lichty was to present a paper on “New Media and Collaboration”, questioning whether New Media has a native culture specifically conducive to collaboration. Following the example of Dr. Brian Oblivion from Cronenberg’s movie “Videodrome”, Lichty began in 2002 to present paper presentations in the form of multimedia and video documents, attending only for discussion and answering questions. This was originally done to combat stress issues and presentation-based ADD, but Lichty now does this to create reiterable documents for critical discussion.

On Valentine’s Day 2007, a powerful storm swept across Chicago and New York, stranding Lichty in Chicago, and necessitating complete virtualization of the presentation in NYC. Because of the inability of the flesh to be present, having ‘crashed’ because of physical limitation due to inclement weather, what options are we then left with? The document has made it to New York, and remains in the Net.

Like Jude from the movie Lawnmower Man, or Flynn from TRON, Lichty (at least for a couple days) is left completely in the virtual, and invites those interested to view the presentation and engage in discourse during the week of 2.14.2007-2.21.2007.

PRESENTATION INTRO/ABSTRACT

For the period of time that New Media art has been in existence, whether under the banner of Art and Technology, CyberArts, or New Media, collaborations have been a highly visible avenue of production. Within the greater New Media genre, there are numerous collectives, such as Jodi.org, Entropy8Zuper, Etoy, Sito.org, Beige, RTMark, Institute for Distributed Culture, Institute for Applied Autonomy, Critical Art Ensemble, The Yes Men, LEMUR, and many others. And although it’s quantitatively hard to prove, one may even be led to consider whether New Media’s origins in technology and computation, and cooevolution with digital networks such as ARPANet, have created a native culture from which collaborative artworks are a natural extension.

Can one say that the collaborative impulse in New Media is a direct reflection of its cultural underpinnings and technical evolution? Surely, the collective or networked culture was forecast at least forty years ago by McLuhan, with his pronouncements of the Global Village, which presciently sounds like forms of 21^st Century Social Media. But is New Media, and its native culture, specifically conducive to collaborations? In this essay, we will examine the cultural conditions of New Media, its necessities, its problems and benefits. In addition, we will examine some models of collaboration that the author has participated in with various groups in order to compare different ways in which New Media artists create together.

REALIZATION:

For the week of 2/14-2/21, Lichty will make the presentation video available as Quicktime stream/downloadable video from his Columbia College webspace, and working draft of the paper available on his voyd.com server. The presentation will be available live on the ground floor and in penthouse of Lichty’s Second Life art center, The BitFactory/Second Front Theatre. In addition, Lichty will also try to be available as much of that week as possible for discussion.

NMCollaboration.blogspot.com has also been created for additional discussion.

I welcome you to view these materials, and humbly submit them for your approval.
I await you in the nets, and apologize for not being able to be there in the flesh.

RESOURCES:

Presentation URL

http://iam.colum.edu/PLichty/CAA2.mov

Blog:

http://NMCollaboration.blogspot.com

Second Life:
The BitFactory Alternative ArtSpace

Han Loso: 81, 39, 137

YIM:

Patlichty

Skype:

Patlichty

AIM:

Patlichty