Twists and Turns of Ingenuity

The NAMAC Conference’s Ingenuity track appeared in high-relief against the Conference’s overall theme of freedom, creativity, and risk in the media arts. These values are certainly within the domain of emerging media, but because new media often take freedom and risk as givens, the initial spirit of adventure may become worn. Mindful of not taking risk for granted, the Ingenuity track presentations had the double duty of presenting fresh ideas and approaches in new media while sparking innovation within strongly held aesthetic convictions and social commitments. After all, what is risk if there is little or nothing of substance to gain or lose?

As it turned out, the track rewarded attendees by riding the twists and turns of innovation and commitment while defining meaningful practices of new media art. The track chairs, Sarah Drury and Caroline Savage are to be commended for carefully assembling six panels that were well conceived thematically and animated by a broad representation of practitioners serving as panelists and moderators. The premise of each panel was open and pointed enough to spark discourse in a given direction without prescribing particularities.

“The Arts of Body Extension, Augmentation, and Amplification” panel gave a double edge to its underlying McLuhanian premise via explorations of media technology in dance, community activism, film and video, and performance. Hana Iverson’s survey of her “used clothing store” as a place of exchange for garments, stories, and identities had an outward thrust that was inverted in an interesting way by Arthur Elsenaar’s and Remko Scha’s “Huge Harry’s Lecture on Facial Expressions” (presented in its entirety that evening at the Tyler School of Art). Elsenaar and Scha employed computer-regulated pulses to control the facial expressions of a “speaker,” extending the capacity of technology to intervene within and to intensify bodily functions. In a more poetic vein, Shelly Barry’s video of vacation footage taken days before a car accident expressed the necessity of proclaiming one’s existence in the face of the severity of technological embodiment. However extended the body may become through technological means, speaking out is necessary just because, as Barry stated, “I am here.”

The next panel, “Narrative Mapping and Network Storytelling,” took the related proclamation of “being here” into urban space and examined it in light of the impulse to tell stories and to build meaningful places in connection with them. The panelists each worked with the situational and geographical aspects of media technologies, especially mobile computing. Hana Iverson’s reappearance offered a (literal) connecting thread between the previous panel and this one, bringing together wearables, handheld computers, surveillance cameras, and an exploration of the way such crisscrossing devices might alter our perceptions and experiences of the city. Nick West offered a clarifying vocabulary for the work: “digital geography,” “locative media,” and “urban prospecting.” Around the panel, story-collecting came up as a common denominator. The story becomes a unit, or a new kind of brick, in these cityscapes experienced as an array of narratives.

The potential for very different habits of writing and reading and their impact on cinema was taken up in “Cinema in Transmission: New Languages/ New Reception.” The artists and theorists here were concerned with emerging forms of cinematic language, where tried-and-true elements such as reels, shots, and frames encounter different modalities and grammars in databases, v-logs, and interactive panoramas. Another link with the panel before was demonstrated by Roderick Coover’s expanded use of interactive multimedia for cultural description and representation. These panels revealed an underlying anthropological interest in different ways of telling and displaying cross-cultural realities. Coover’s work showed how we must learn break the frame and to juggle and balance varying cinematic spaces and tropes in visual documentary. Along with Coover, Glorianna Davenport’s networked documentary film clips and archived stories questioned the anthropological sense of digital culture and digital history.

Graham Weinbren’s introduction at the following panel, “New Media Architectures,” restored the spatial and architectural face to these questions concerning new media. His advice from Wittgenstein to return to first principles offered a good turning point for the conference track itself: to gather what we have learned from decades of media experimentation and to refine the space-making power of informational materials. The emphasis on the materiality of expression was interesting here given the dissolving abstractions of cyberspace, which may have captivated us during previous conferences. Media artists still assemble and craft materials for their spatial constructions, and the work of panelists Galen Joseph Hunter, Hilary Harp, Suzy Silver, and Doug Bohr testified to the continuing development of a kind of architecturally-laden media craft.

A similar set of questions about the return to fundamentals in new media came up in “New News.” As Fred Ritchin observed, people are fed up with excesses and corruptions of mainstream news, and making ours an interesting time for approaches that combine experimental forms with the integrity of resistant messages. Another persistent theme was the emergent democracy of news-making, which deemphasizes professionals and favors anyone that has a digital camera, iPod, blog, or an opinion to share. The discussion that ensued was the most animated yet, raising interesting questions about access, the subversive potential of alternative media, and the limits of knowledge when we find ourselves “off the grid” in rural communities.

Perhaps it was the relative intimacy of the Bromley Claypool room that encouraged the animated discussion to continue into the next and final panel, “New Economies of Information Production”; another connecting link, thematically, was overcoming the limitations of knowledge and know-how. Wayne Ashley testified to the existence of different funding sources for cultural projects if one breaks out of the usual local, state, and federal funding spheres. But his experience had more to do with the way that different institutional frameworks and their epistemological assumptions could come together in producing large-scale art and technology projects. Trebor Scholz gave an overview of the possibilities of distributed sharing of knowledge through web-based systems that apply an open source model of software development and distribution to academic research. All of which brought us to Robert Bedoya’s bid to nudge cultural policymaking away from the empiricism of sociologists and toward a form of “deliberative democracy.” Bedoya nicely boiled down the policy-talk in his concluding statement: “We should be mindful of how we talk to each other.”

This seemingly offhand remark resonates for me as a summation of the Ingenuity track’s multiple encounters with risky practices and ideas. Media transition is always a mixture of risk and tradition, as adventurous and established systems interact and compete with one other. But the track seemed to go beyond this collusion of new and old, taking into consideration the more charged overlay of differing frameworks of communication and social institutions—something as simple as constructing ingenious channels for having people with very different points of view talk with each other. The plenary sessions seemed to reinforce this message. A number of speakers brought out the challenges of bridging competing frameworks—whether connecting the black box of cinema with the white gallery of alternative spaces, the neighborhood community with the museum, the nonprofit mission with corporate commerce. Sometimes bridging frameworks raises the unease of working in situations with ill-defined parameters, boundaries, or guidelines, such as the vagueness of copyright law. It was good to see the Ingenuity track confront all of this while staying true to the imperative of having a message. And that’s a risky balancing act.