[Leonardo/ISAST Network] Mark Amerika and Alexander Galloway at the Disrupting Narratives symposium, London, July 13th

[Leonardo/ISAST]

Disrupting Narratives
Friday 13 July 2007, 10.00--18.30
Tate Modern Starr Auditorium, Bankside, London SE1

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/8896.htm

Leonardo Book Series authors Mark Amerika and Alexander Galloway will 
each give a keynote address for the "Disrupting Narratives" symposium, 
organized by Kate Southworth, in collaboration with the Tate Modern and 
iRes (Research in Interactive Art & Design) at University College 
Falmouth. This international symposium brings together some of the 
world's leading media artists, theorists and researchers to explore 
real-time interaction in electronic media. Over the last few years 
network theories have started to shape our thinking about social and 
cultural issues. This event seeks out artistic strategies and art forms 
that engage with these ideas. Contributors include: Mark Amerika, 
Alexander R Galloway, Andrea Zapp, Kelli Dipple, Kate Rich and Paul Sermon.
 
Session 1 keynote address
Mark Amerika: Remixology, Hybridized Processes, and Postproduction Art: 
A Counternarrative

In this keynote address, artist and theorist Mark Amerika remixes 
personal narrative, philosophical inquiry, spontaneous theories, and 
cyberpunk fictions that investigate the emergence of digitally 
constructed identities, fictional personas, experiential metadata, 
narrative mythologies, and collaborative networks. Locating what he 
describes as the "postproduction artist" who engages with D-I-Y 
networking and alternative distribution schemes to build new models of 
audience development, Amerika will role-play the contemporary 
remixologist who is part VJ, part novelist, and part net artist, a 
made-up character in a book yet written, someone who uses the forms of 
new media not so much to counter spectacle in the media culture, but to 
create a counternarrative drift that moves away from the art object per 
se while investigating the depth of possibilities waiting to be 
discovered in the creative unconscious.
 
Mark Amerika's book /META/DATA: A Digital Poetics/ was recently 
published by the MIT Press for the Leonardo Book Series in April 2007. 
For more information, or to purchase a copy, visit the Leonardo Book 
Series online: http://leonardo.info/isast/leobooks/books/amerika.html

Session 2 keynote address
Alexander R Galloway: Counter-Protocol

In this keynote address, Alexander Galloway asks us to imagine an art 
exhibit of computer viruses. How would one curate such a show? Would the 
exhibition consist of documentation of known viruses, or of viruses 
roaming live? Would it be more like an archive or more like a zoo? 
Perhaps the exhibit would require the coordination of several museums, 
each with "honey pot" computers, sacrificial lambs offered up as 
attractor hosts for the contagion. A network would be required, the sole 
purpose of which would be to reiterate sequences of infection and 
replication. Now imagine an exhibit of a different sort: a museum 
exhibit dedicated to epidemics. Again, how would one curate an exhibit 
of disease? Would it include the actual virulent microbes themselves (in 
a sort of "microbial menagerie"), in addition to the documentation of 
epidemics in history? Would the epidemics have to be "historical" in 
order for them to qualify for exhibition? Or would two entirely 
different types of institutions be required: a museum of the present 
versus a museum of the past? In this talk Alexander Galloway explores a 
"counter-protocol" aesthetic and how it relates to the contemporary 
landscape of artmaking.
 
Alex Galloway's book /Protocol: How Control Exists after 
Decentralization/ was published by the MIT Press for the Leonardo Book 
Series in 2004. For more information, or to purchase a copy, visit the 
Leonardo Book Series online: 
http://leonardo.info/isast/leobooks/books/galloway.html

MEMBER DISCOUNT! Leonardo/ISAST Associate Members are eligible for 20% 
off all Leonardo Book Series titles as well as a number of other 
membership benefits! Visit http://leonardo.info/members.html for more 
details.
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