[ISEA2011] Paper: Eva Kekou & Patrick Lichty — Network culture, media art: urban identity and cultural change dialectics

Abstract

Session: City, Public Space and Mobile Technologies

Network culture is a broad sociocultural shift. Under network culture both art and everyday life take mediation as a given. Furthermore in our days networked connection replaces abstraction. Information is less the product of discrete procession units than the outcome of the networked relations between them, links between people,between machines and between machines and people. Although other ages have been networked, ours is the first modern age in which the network is the dominant organisational paradigm,supplanting centalized hierarchies. This paper is going to address the question of self in an intersubjective perspective that provileges connections between individuals, rather than separations, boundaries and borders.?It is also going to showcase a number of media art projects and discuss the relation between media art and network cultures. Furthermore it is going to investigate to which extent media art projects can relate to a new urban and cultural identity (from both artist’s and audience’s perspective).

  • Eva Kekou  has a multidisciplinary background (literature, art history and political theory). She has been lecturing at various academic institutions worldwide. Her fields of expertise are locative media, psychogeography, interactive media and urban studies. She has presented and published at international conferences and has also curated exhibitions, workshops in Greece.
  • Patrick Lichty is a media artist, writer, in­de­pen­dent cu­ra­tor, an­i­ma­tor for the ac­tivist group The Yes Men, and Ex­ec­u­tive Ed­i­tor of In­tel­li­gent Agent mag­a­zine. He began show­ing tech­no­log­i­cal media art in 1989, and deals with works and writ­ing that ex­plore the so­cial re­la­tions be­tween us and media. Venues in which Lichty has been in­volved with solo and col­lab­o­ra­tive works in­clude the Whit­ney & Turin Bi­en­ni­als, Mari­bor Tri­en­nial, Per­forma Per­for­mance Bi­en­nial, Ars Elec­tron­ica, and the In­ter­na­tional Sym­po­sium on Elec­tronic Art (ISEA). He also works ex­ten­sively with vir­tual worlds, in­clud­ing Sec­ond Life, and his work, both solo and with his per­for­mance art group, Sec­ond Front, has been fea­tured in Flash Art, Eikon Milan, and Art­News. He is also an As­sis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Media The­ory and Ex­per­i­men­tal Gen­res at Co­lum­bia Col­lege Chicago, USA.