creativity

I received an invitation from Peter Noever, director of Vienna-based contemporary art museum the MAK, to contribute a piece of writing to their annual report. Peter wrote:

The MAK has always seen itself as a place of social awareness beyond its assigned function as a site of art and a laboratory of art production. Under the heading of “AGENDA ART 2010,” we are now trying to draw up scenarios on the future of art: Which production conditions, which values in society, which extent of interaction with politics and the economy would be desirable for art? And how can these scenarios be made real? An avant-garde paper of this style can only be developed with the help of visionary minds from the fields of art, architecture, design, and the humanities.

Below are the themes and speakers of a conference, hosted by the Integrated Digital Media Institute and Othmer Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, where I'll be giving a presentation based on the ideas in my paper with Robert K. Logan, "Designing for Emergence and Innovation." More background may be found at http://idmi.poly.edu/

The Production of Politics Thursday October 19th 11am to 2pm

Richard Rogers, Director, govcom.org, University of Amsterdam

Tom Keenan, Director, the Human Rights Project, Bard College

Karen J. Hall, Humanities postdoctoral fellow, Syracuse University

Atopia (Jane Harrison and David Turnbull), Urban research and design office, New York

The Art of Work in the Age of Post-production Thursday October 19th 3pm to 6pm

Rev. Luke Murphy, Artist, VP of Technology, MTV Networks

Greg Van Alstyne, Senior Research Associate, Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity, Ontario College of Art & Design

Ruth Ron, Architect and new media artist, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Florida

Blogging: around the table Friday October 20th 11am to 2pm

Jodi Dean, Teaches political theory at Hobart-William Smith colleges and maintains jdeanicite.typepad.com

Geert Lovink, Media theorist and activist, University of Amsterdam

McKenzie Wark, Author of the Hacker Manifesto and teaches media studies at Lang College, the New School

Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University

The Politics of Production Friday October 20th 3pm to 6pm

Michael Liegl, Ethnographer, University of Munich

Eric Redlinger, Musician, network administrator, member of Share collective, New York-Montreal-San Diego-Wiesbaden

Michael J. Schumacher, Composer, performer, director of Diapason sound gallery, New York

Katherine Carl, Co-director, the School of Missing Studies, New York-Sarajevo

Note to self: complete this post by quoting my original post from massivechange.com: http://forums.massivechange.com/viewtopic.php?t=15

I thought about creating a place where I can list examples of metabolo in contemporary culture, as I encounter or think of them, and expand on them later. This post is that place.

Examples:

• Flock - the browser I'm using right now
• Media ecology - a young discipline pioneered by Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and others
• Rabid media attention described as a "feeding frenzy." On this note, one relative of the slain child Jon Bennet Ramsey said the media attention was "like having a wild animal attached to your face."
• Macintosh's pulsating status light -- like a sleeping animal's breathing
• Linkrot - apt... if not pretty

The stated mission of the Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity is: to enhance education with new methodologies in imaginative thinking; to contribute to the development of knowledge and economic wellbeing; and to explore new ways of improving the human condition.