several self-styled summits, a variety of public
art, performances,
lectures, and exhibitions associated with the 13th
biannual meeting
of ISEA, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts. It
began August 4 and
ends August 13.
.... As an outsider I became involved in 2005 after
talking with Joel
Slayton, the Chair for ZeroOne and the ISEA2006
Symposium. He was
planning one of the satellite events, the Pacific
Rim New Media
Summit, and I agreed to pull together a working
group on "piracy in
the Pacific" to look at trends, conflicts, and
issues related to
intellectual property (IP), piracy, sharing, and
appropriation. ....
... The Pacific Rim New Media Summit .... was held
at King Library,
the unique joint university-public library in
downtown San Jose.
Slayton's staff and students provided good
logistical support before
and during the meeting which occupied two full days
of presentations
and discussions. The summit was meant to encourage
international
cooperation and collaboration in a number of areas.
The working
groups included these topics:
-Distributed curatorial
-Education
-Urbanity and mobile media
-Place, ground, and practice
-Latin America-Pacific/Asia New Media Initiatives
-Residencies and symposia
-Piracy and the Pacific
-Invisible dynamics of the Pacific rim & bay area
Leading up to the summit there was an online forum
which was never
used by more than a few of the many members. Each
working group was
somewhat fluid, and the chair changed in a couple,
and many members
did not attend for different reasons: other
commitments, lack of
money, or visa problems. At ISEA Trebor Scholz whose
institute
focuses on "cooperation studies", gave a paper about
social networks
and why people take part online. Though he was part
of a working
group in our summit he did not attend.
Danny_1 Danny Butt (Place, Ground, and practice) was
the chair and
only attendee from his group, and though he claimed
he had failed, he
presented a good summary of their activities leading
up to the
summit, including a significant and intimate
gathering in New Zealand
which could not be duplicated in this venue.
One chair thought he was coming to work together for
two days mainly
with his group, and like me, he met them for the
first time shortly
before they were due to present. My own group did
not work that much
together before, but they all helped me a great deal
as I was
preparing a short video "Piracy in the Pacific" for
a DVD project
Leonardo had hoped to publish. Once we met the
afternoon before the
presentation we were able to find some common
disagreements to
discuss during the summit. Piracy and copyright is
very, very
contentious, and I assembled a CD-ROM of videos,
rants, white papers,
books, and proceedings that covered a spectrum of
views from
anarchist to Hollywood and law enforcement. We
handed this out to
everyone present (about 45).
The organizers suggested we might want to have
statements to take to
ISEA, or perhaps a manifesto, but this did not seem
to happen. I
think there were some good connections made, and
some working groups
planned to carry on with other projects. I wondered
what the summit
would have been if it were the main focus in San
Jose rather than the
much larger ISEA meetings and exhibitions.