Summer 2009
| v.05 n.02 |
Posted: August 6th, 2009
CAA Conference Edition, 2009
New Media Caucus Events at the CAA Conference, Los Angeles, 2009
Editorial Statement
The New Media Caucus continues to go from strength to strength! At this year’s College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles the New Media Caucus sponsored three outstanding panels and mounted a ground-breaking exhibition. The CAA Affiliate Panel, “Mail Away: War Correspondence at Home and Online” was chaired by Lindsay Kelley and featured presentations by Wafaa Bilal, Joseph DeLappe, Elizabeth Losh and Krista Genevieve Lynes. The role popular and new media play in the way society views the current US conflicts was explored. Kelley posed the question: “How are artists and cultural producers critically engaged with current conditions of war?” This question was addressed by the panelists from the perspective of their particular artistic activities and cultural research. At the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), the New Media Caucus hosted two additional affiliated panels, the first “Space, The New Frontier” was chaired by Belinda Haikes and featured presentations by Robert Gero, Peter Baldes and Jenn Figg. The panel explored the ways new technologies change how society conceptualizes space, and how artists express these ideological shifts. In the second panel, “Video Games as Medium, Future Paradigms and Practices” chaired by Mike Salmond, with presentations by Eddo Stern, Ben Chang and Jon Cates, the current and future status of the video game was explored as medium, cultural artifact and art form.
The chairs were invited to choose the approach by which their panel reports were presented in the journal, to reflect the individual character of the panel and style of the presentations. Therefore in each case the report they present here is unique to the panel: some chose traditional paper presentations, others a synopsis or transcription of their presentations.
In addition to the panels, NMC mounted the exhibition, “@” at SCI-Arc with equipment support from Side Street Projects; the exhibition was organized by Leslie RaymonVice President of Exhibitions. It “challenge[d] artists to consider place & placelessness from within the context of networked culture.” The show connected a physical exhibition of works at SCI-Arc and a parallel exhibition in the Second Life metaverse. It included 10 video works curated by Vagner Whitehead (both documentary works from Second Life and video works from RL), physical pieces and installations in the gallery space, and a range of Second Life pieces co-curated by James Morgan and E. Marie Robertson. E. Marie Robertson discusses the works and the complexities of the show in her review for the journal.
Special thanks to the panel chairs for their efforts in making this journal edition possible. Thanks also to E. Marie Robertson for her review of “@”.
Rachel Clarke, Editor-in-Chief, media-N
rclarke
csus
edu
August, 2009