[-empyre-] empyre: engagement is all

[Johannes Birringer]

hello soft_skinned place


so have you resisted today? have you kissed someone today?

all kinds of images were going through my mind as I tried to imagine Gary Warner walking home after dusk from the Iseaplaces of invocation
and citation (on old powerpoint slides), the "polity of digital arts like-mindedness", the "algorithmic second-guessing"  - that phrase made my day,
as i also imagine Terry Flaxton now wandering the streets of Venice and the arsenals and encyclopedic palaces of art, and Paul Sermon reports
his discomfort with centralized commercialized & defined practices as well as the tinted glasses of urbanized Isea. It's interesting, in response to
Paul, to imagine Terry's long durational view of the human species as a reply, namely that "the  ever increasing ubiquity and pervasiveness of technology"
is a long and durable existing paradigm, not a new one. Technologies have always been ubiquitous. Should we not ask what lies underneath
the repeating proclamations of a paradigm change that is in need of "mapping"?  Who is mapping them for whom?

(I am missing all the conferences; here comes an announcement of 2013 DRHA (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts conference):
>
"Reconceptualising Digital Creativity; Re-mapping Behaviour, Engagement and Archiving in the 21 Century" //

The theme of this conference will focus on the need to re-conceptualize the ways in which we engage with digital technology in particular regard to the speed with which we are exposed to new technologies. As societies around the world face fundamental ecological, demographic and economic changes, we are forced to re-evaluate our relationship with natural and digital resources. Also, as the next generation of digital natives start to design new interactive futures, the old paradigms of knowledge exchange, and social interaction are making way for socialized gaming and crowd sourcing. The focus for this conference will be to re-imagining new and contemporary ways for designing digital engagement, looking at possible events and social practices that lay just around the corner. Interdisciplinary processes are assumed strategies in this conference so that we can focus on how we can, using contemporary technology, map the emerging digital and social landscape......
>

What do the conferences reflect, other than an industrial obligation (of academia) to engage "algorithmic second-guessing", and negligible resistances (to what?). I think Gary is highly ironic
when mentioning the flickering engagement, the cascades......  What do we make of them?

The old paradigms of social interaction are not making way yet either, they are still obligatory, no?
so are the streets on which we walk home.

regards
Johannes Birringer