[ISEA98] Panel: Kate Richards & Maria Stukoff — Tongue Twisters

Panel Statement

A strategic word game articulating forms of digital aesthetics and transformations. A panel session consisting of a total of 14 small individual essays each 1-2 pages long, developing a performative talk session in which participants can freely interact with the development of our panel presentation. Several switch devices will be positioned throughout the room acting as an interface between us and the audience. On each occasion the audience can play the pool of potential essays and their order by pressing the switch and therefore shape the course of the ideas presented. We are foremost interested in creating an open platform for discussion encouraging exchange and understanding rather than offering a menu of prescriptive ideas delivered out off a paper bag. Everyone will have a go in participating in the rules and discussions. Numerous small essay’s will be “played” one on one creating a critique and overview of electronic art practices, related research fields, and its effect on our common social consciousness. We will comment on how our own electronic art practice has begun to re-shape community awareness from an individual to a public sphere but without any protest or resistance to this infiltration. Usually mere speculative transformations in politics, policies and social choices are often accompanied with outcry and resistance. Thus we will begin to query how a network of ideas can shape a consciousness – a community where this infiltration is not felt at the first instance but will cause some casualties of this electronic revolution. Values (wants-advertising), mis-interpretation (fear-geography) and educational access (computers-government funding) are still the major factors in how this revolution may or may not surface. With the daily arrival of new technologies that re-organizes our relationship and understanding to digital aesthetics and the course of art making the panel will proceed to comment on the responsibilities faced by artists, the audience and the wider community at large to make a positive transition from the now to a possible electronic art future. Each specific theme of past ISEA symposia will be interwoven to showcase the growing convergence between the visual arts and digital prophesies with visual documentation of interactive works and sound pieces.
Kate Richards & Maria Stukoff describe themselves as foremost interested in creating an open platform for discussion – “encouraging exchange and understanding rather than offering a menu of prescriptive ideas delivered out off a paper bag.” Their work in the publication may reflect their approach to such transactions and explore a number of different formats which will be further developed in gatherings at The Terror.

  • Kate Richards (AU) is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Media and Text at the University of Technology, Sydney and a practicing Multimedia and Video Artist.
  • Maria N. Stukoff (CA), is an independent Electronic Artist and part-time Academic in the field of Digital Art and Communications Media. Currently she is working at the ISEA HQ in Montreal and is collaborating with The Terror team on a number of variations to traditional conference presentation formats, which incorporate and question digital aesthetics.