[-empyre-] introducing Jason Freeman and Patrick Lichty

[Anna Munster]

I'd now like to introduce the next two authors, Jason Freeman and Patrick Lichty (intros at bottom of email). I am also going to talk a little about my chapter this week. But since we are now going to have a lot of threads going at the one time, I might move through this person by person.

First up, Jason, your chapter – "Storage In Collaborative Networked Art" (http://freeman.networkedbook.org/storage-in-collaborative-networked-art/)
draws attention to the often overlooked everyday infrastructural aspects of networked practices such as the storage of data. You emphasise  that the very fact that data is stored for and in networked transmission undercuts our obsession with immediacy and presence. The point you strongly make is that the more networked we become, the more we store.

Additionally you use the pairing of transmission and storage as a  method for analysing different forms of networked music/sound art:

	I define a division between transmission-focused works and storage-focused works. The former facilitate real-time communication among network nodes or 	participants...In contrast, storage-focused works would be difficult or impossible to realize without a networked storage mechanism.

You do mention that there is much ambiguous territory in between. Before we get into the territory of particular artists, I'm wondering whether you think a lack of  acknowledgment or under-acknowledgment of storage as a vital aspect of the infrastructure of networks has made music a territory both easily transmissable (via peer-to-peer) but also open to a potential re-capture via vested interests in the music industry (post-Napstar, Kazaa etc)? In other words might one of the implications of your conceptual framework be: we need to take basic networked infrastructure much more seriously?!

Coming off the back of this, what are the implications of this for mobile networks and media practice (I am thinking here of the potentially proprietorial aspects of cloud storage/computing)?

best Anna

BIOGRAPHY: Jason Freeman breaks down conventional barriers between composers, performers, and listeners, using cutting-edge technology and unconventional notation to turn audiences and musicians into compositional collaborators.

Freeman’s works have been featured in The New York Times, on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and online at USA Today, Wired, and Billboard, which called Network Auralization for Gnutella (N.A.G.) “an example of the Web’s mind-expanding possibilities.” His instrumental compositions have been performed by groups ranging from the American Composers Orchestra, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Nieuw Ensemble, and Speculum Musicae to the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the So Percussion Group, and an elementary school band, chorus, and orchestra in Richmond, Virginia. Freeman has also published articles about his work in Computer Music Journal, Leonardo, Organised Sound, and the Journal of New Music Research.


BIOGRAPHY: Patrick Lichty (b.1962) is a technologically-based conceptual 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 the Electronic Arts (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 Interactive Arts & Media at Columbia College Chicago, and resides in Baton Rouge, LA.



A/Prof. Anna Munster
Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting)
Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
School of Art History and Art Education
College of Fine Arts
UNSW
P.O. Box 259
Paddington
NSW 2021
612 9385 0741 (tel)
612 9385 0615(fax)
a.munster at unsw.edu.au