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ISEA2013

7-16 June 2013


 Da Contents H2

July 24 2013
Past-present tensions
Keith Gallasch, Naala-Ba (Look Future), Carriageworks and ISEA2013

July 3 2013
Data noise & the limits of dance
Keith Gallasch, Myriam Gourfink & Kaspar Toeplitz, Breathing Monster

June 26 2013
Nailing the virtual
Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch, The Portals

Night work
Keith Gallasch, Embodied Media, Night Rage

Palpable virtualities
Keith Gallasch, Paula Dawson, Holoshop: Drawing and Perceiving in Depth

The big connect
Somaya Langley, The Portals

Transformational walking
Anne Phillips, Long Time, No See?

June 18 2013
Musical multiverses
Gail Priest, Polysonics

Rainbow over ISEA
Keith Gallasch, Electric Nights

realtime tv @ ISEA2013: Zydnei, Troy Innocent

June 17 2013
If a system fails in a forest, is anybody listening?
Urszula Dawkins, If a system fails in a forest…, 107 Projects

June 16 2013
In the digital age, love your stationery obsession
Urszula Dawkins, Durational Book

Painting by algorithms
Keith Gallasch, Ernest Edmonds: Light Logic

June 15 2013
Home, sweet home
Urszula Dawkins, disSentience, Sleeth, SelgasCano, Tin Sheds

Pop up pleasure zones
Gail Priest, Electronic Art Pop-Ups, The Rocks

June 14 2013
Aural ecologies, mechanical and musical
Urszula Dawkins, EchoSonics, UTS Gallery

June 14 2013
Heck, baby, I shoulda seen it comin…
Urszula Dawkins, The Very Near Future, Alex Davies

More than meets the eye
Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch, Point of View

New tools and old skool grammars
Gail Priest, Macrophonics II

realtime tv @ ISEA2013: The very near future, Alex Davies

Start by leaping off a small stool
Urszula Dawkins, ISEA Closing Keynote Address: Julian Assange

June 13 2013
A curative dose of spontaneity
Lauren Carroll Harris, pvi collective, Deviator

M e d i a a r t t h e n a n d n o w
Darren Tofts, Catching Light, Campbelltown Arts Centre

Olfaction, decay & speculation
Gail Priest, Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris, Ian Haig, Nandita Kumar, Verge Gallery

ART, WELLNESS & DEATH
Riding the theta waves
Urszula Dawkins, Theta Lab, George Poonkhin Khut and James Brown


Run for your lives [2]
Keith Gallasch, Running the City, COFA, UNSW

To re-map and reclaim
Lisa Gye, Mapping Culture [panel]

Turning the media back on itself
Lisa Gye, Mark Hosler, Adventures in Illegal Art

June 12 2013
Outside the labyrinth…looking in at someone waving
Urszula Dawkins, SoundLabyrinth, Mark Pedersen and Roger Alsop

realtime tv @ ISEA2013: semipermeable (+), SymbioticA

Run for your lives [1]
Keith Gallasch, Marnix de Nijs, Run Motherfucker Run

June 12 2013
The uncanny in the gallery
Keith Gallasch, Mari Velonaki, Simon Ingram, Petra Gemeinboeck & Rob Saunders, Artspace

June 11 2013
realtime tv @ ISEA2013: EchoSonics, UTS Gallery

The science and art of tangible things
Urszula Dawkins, Synapse: A Selection, Powerhouse

Touch me there
Gail Priest, ISEA Artist talks: Siu, Baumann, Velonaki

June 10 2013
Being Stelarc
Gail Priest, Stelarc: Meat, Metal, Code: Engineering affect and aliveness

Life and death, and the membranes inbetween
Urszula Dawkins, semipermeable (+), SymbioticA

realtime tv @ ISEA2013: Catching Light, Campbelltown Arts Centre

June 9 2013
'Pure' experience, in the round
Urszula Dawkins, Pure Land, iCinema

Data lives
Gail Priest, Genevieve Bell, Mark Hosler, Paolo Cirio & Alessandro Ludovico

realtime tv @ ISEA2013: Velonaki, Ingram, Gemeinboeck & Saunders, Artspace

June 8 2013
Knowing your place in Cartesian space
Gail Priest, Ryoji Ikeda, datamatics [ver 2.0]

Stars and starlings, pixels and picknickers
Urszula Dawkins, Ryoji Ikeda, datamatics [ver 2.0] & test pattern

 

Transformational walking

Anne Phillips, Long Time, No See?

Anne Phillips is a senior Corporate Communications Consultant helping Australian and international organisations understand and engage with their audiences.

Keith Armstrong and collaborators, Long Time, No See? Keith Armstrong and collaborators, Long Time, No See?
The Long Time, No See? workshop, or “walkshop” as it was described in the brochure, came at the tail end of the packed ISEA2013 program, by which time my energy levels were seriously beginning to lag.

However, the promise of participating in a collective imagining of the future through a Smartphone App which documents each participant’s journey and then generates an online artwork complete with algorithmic soundscape was more than enough to motivate me to make the trip to Parramatta. I just wasn’t sure if it was enough to keep me awake throughout the day. This was something I need not have worried about.

Setting your compass

Our foray into Long Time, No See? began not with the App but with a brown paper bag containing instructions and workbooks. I was tempted to say something smart about whether we had to burn them afterwards, but I managed to restrain myself. To be honest, after a week of incessantly wielding iPhone and laptop I was enjoying handling the crisp paper booklets.

It seems that Long Time, No See? is much more than an App or a website. It’s about alternative ways of imagining the world. Writer and workshop facilitator Linda Carroli describes it as “a type of hopeful adventure” which endeavours to “make the invisible visible.” Carroli paced back and forth as she spoke, gently urging us into thoughtful interrogations of about how we, as individuals and communities, construct the future.

Her narrative was subtle, abstract and oddly compelling. I began to suspect that the simplicity of the language concealed the project’s deep intellectual underpinnings. The Creative Director of Long Time, No See?, I felt that Keith Armstrong, silently observing our progress, should have been holding up a sign saying “Warning: Deep Waters Ahead.”

We spent the morning working through the group activities outlined in the “Setting your Compass” booklet, which prompted us to reflect on keywords such as “intent,” “care” and “change” in a number of contexts, before being led outdoors, Apps in hand, by Carroli’s quiet, challenging narrative.

Field testing

In the centre of a grassy expanse in a nearby park, each of us marked the spot where we intended to start. The first of nine stages outlined by the App directed us to take one step forward and two steps back and so on until we’d taken nine steps, but ended up being three steps behind the place from where we intended to start.

Embarking on a journey which didn’t seem to progress very far was amusingly metaphorical. The process also made me more aware of my surroundings, because I’m inclined to march from place to place as if I were a contestant in a plain-clothes orienteering competition. While it initially took quite a while to travel a very short distance, in the following stages, we were free to cover as much or as little ground as we wished.

At each stage the App prompted us to select keywords or tags and directed us to observe or interact with our surroundings by making notes, photographs or sound recordings. I had some trouble with the App’s sound recorder, but designer Robert Henderson and software developer Petros Nyfantis quickly ironed out the glitches and I was soon immersed in the contemplative process of walking, observing and reflecting.

Future mapping

Completing the walk felt like an achievement in itself, but seeing the data we had generated uploaded onto community.long-time-no-see.org provided a whole new world to explore. Our walks appeared to hover in space as ‘islands,’ consisting of waypoints or nodes in the form of photographs or tags joined together by lines.

The islands in Long Time, No See? are plotted in relation to ideas, so that someone’s walk in Brisbane can appear in close proximity to one in Parramatta if they have used similar tags or ideas. The background, which consists of layers of geological, climatic and urbanisation data, is accompanied by a spectacular generative soundscape created by composer Roger Dean, which reconfigures itself via an algorithm depending on the proximity of ideas to each other.

Even though it was late in the day, seeing Long Time, No See? in action proved to be a complex sensory experience—highly sculptural and extremely thought provoking. We found ourselves eagerly discussing how our individual explorations fitted in to the broader picture described on the map and identifying where our thoughts coincided with those of others.

Now that we have our login details, we can create new walks or review old ones through the App or access the web-based visualisation on our desktops, providing there’s a high-speed internet connection.

At this stage, there is a limit to the number of walks which can be depicted on Long Time, No See? at one time, so your walks won’t stay on the website indefinitely. However, the Long Time, No See? team seem to be brimming with ideas and so we can expect much from this project in the future.


Embodiedmedia, Long Time, No See?, creative director Keith Armstrong, community engagement, writer, urban practitioner Linda Carroli, interaction designer Gavin Sade, lead designer Robert Henderson, generative sound artist Roger Dean, software developer Petros Nyfantis, front end development Johnson Page. Presented by ISEA2013 and supported by ICE (Information and Cultural Exchange), Parramatta, 15-30 June

Anne Phillips is a senior Corporate Communications Consultant helping Australian and international organisations understand and engage with their audiences.

© Anne Phillips; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]

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