Chris Joseph

New technologies have had a major influence on the way we communicate and use language today: punctuation and capital letters are being dropped in favour of emoticons, letter-number homophones and acronyms. But are email, instant messaging and mobile text messaging degrading the language? This question surfaces in debates among writers, language professionals and academics, as well as among parents and their children.

Panelists:

- Nadine F - editor/designer, Wordrobe [ wordrobe.net ]
- Simon Perril, Poet and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English at De Montfort University [ dmu.ac.uk/faculties/humanities/english/simon_perril.jsp ]
- Jess Laccetti, Doctoral Researcher and Lecturer at De Montfort University [ jesslaccetti.co.uk ]
- Hugo Worthy, Writer and Archivist
- Chris Joseph, Chair [ chrisjoseph.org ]

This event took place as part of cultural eXchanges, an annual event hosted by the Faculty of Humanities at De Montfort University.

CALL FOR PAPERS AND ARTWORKS/GAMES/DEMOS

3rd ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts
DIMEA 2008

10-12 September 2008
Athens Information Technology (AIT), Athens, Greece
Conference Web site: http://www.dimea2008.org

Full Papers and Art Works/Games/Demos Submission Deadline: May 12th, 2008
Workshop Proposals Deadline: April 21st, 2008 (EXTENDED)
Tutorial Proposals Deadline: April 18th, 2008

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The advances in computer entertainment, multi-player/online gaming, technology-enabled art, culture and performance have created new forms of entertainment that attract, immerse and absorb their participants. The phenomenal success of such a “culture” to initiate a mass audience in patterns and practices of its own consumption has supported the evolution of an
enormously powerful mass entertainment, digital art and performance industry extending deeply into every aspect of our lives, leading further to major societal and business contacting changes.

The International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (DIMEA), in cooperation with ACM, is the premier forum for the presentation of societal, business and technological advances and research results in cross-disciplinary areas
related with digital interactive media in entertainment, art and creative technologies. This conference is dedicated to build common ground between research, design and development, learning and collaboration in its myriad digital media forms: one of its many
objectives is the exploration of ‘play & learn’, demonstrating new arenas and applications for digital gaming and incorporating leading edge technologies, designs and models in our changing views about what is involved in gaming.

DIMEA 2008 is jointly organized by Athens Information Technology (AIT), ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI, Singapore Chapter) and the Society for Excellence and Innovation in Interactive Experience Design (InExDe).

DIMEA 2008 will bring together academics, technologists, artists, designers, and industry representatives to address and advance the leading edge of new digital and interactive media.

Read more

From the authors:

The state of writing among teens today is marked by an interesting paradox: While teens are heavily embedded in a tech-rich world and craft a significant amount of electronic text, they see a fundamental distinction between their electronic social communications and the more formal writing they do for school or for personal reasons.

* 87% of youth ages 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication, which includes text messaging, sending email or instant messages, or posting comments on social networking sites.
* 60% of teens do not think of these electronic texts as “writing.”

Teens are utilitarian in their approach to technology and writing, using both computers and longhand depending on circumstances. Their use of computers for school and personal writing is often tied to the convenience of being able to edit easily. And while they do not think their use of computers or their text-based communications with friends influences their formal writing, many do admit that the informal styles that characterize their e-communications do occasionally bleed into their schoolwork.

* 57% of teens say they revise and edit more when they write using a computer.
* 63% of teens say using computers to write makes no difference in the quality of the writing they produce.
* 73% of teens say their personal electronic communications (email, IM, text messaging) have no impact on the writing they do for school, and 77% said they have no impact on the writing they do for themselves.
* 64% of teens admit that they incorporate, often accidentally, at least some informal writing styles used in personal electronic communication into their writing for school. (Some 25% have used emoticons in their school writing; 50% have used informal punctuation and grammar; 38% have used text shortcuts such as “LOL” meaning “laugh out loud.”)

All of this matters more than ever because teenagers and their parents uniformly believe that good writing is a bedrock for future success. Eight in ten parents believe that good writing skills are more important now than they were 20 years ago, and 86% of teens believe that good writing ability is an important component of guaranteeing success later in life.

These are among the key findings in a national phone survey of 700 youth ages 12-17 and their parents conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the National Commission on Writing. The survey was completed in mid-November and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points. The report also contains findings from eight focus groups in four U.S. cities conducted in the summer of 2007.

For the full report please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/247/report_display.asp

About the Pew Internet & American Life Project: The Pew Internet Project is an initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit “fact tank” that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. Pew Internet explores the impact of the internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care and civic/political life. Support for the project is provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The project’s Web site: http://www.pewinternet.org

About the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools and Colleges: In an effort to focus national attention on the teaching and learning of writing, the College Board established the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges in September 2002. The decision to create the Commission was animated in part by the Board’s plans to offer a writing assessment in 2005 as part of the new SAT(r), but the larger motivation lay in the growing concern within the education, business, and policy-making communities that the level of writing in the United States is not what it should be.
http://www.writingcommission.org/

New Reviews at Furtherfield.org April 2008.

http://www.furtherfield.org

Artwork by Willy LeMaitre & Eric Rosenzveig
Artwork Title - The Appearance Machine
Review by Natasha Chuk
Review Title - Trash Talk: A Review of The Appearance Machine by Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig.
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For nearly ten years, trash has been the focus of a massive project, an audiovisual work called The Appearance Machine, by artists Willy Le Maitre & Eric Rosenzveig. This is a project that deals firsthand with an overabundance of material that won’t go away, and about seeing the beautiful possibilities of trash, giving the act of recycling a new context. The result is conflicting, producing in the viewer a sense of alienation and comfort, disbelief and wonder.
Permlink: http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=303

Artwork by Richard Wright
Artwork Title - The Internet Speaks
Review by Mark Hancock
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The Internet Speaks: contemplating the nature of images on the net and how we read them without recourse to text and context.
There are two versions to this project. The gallery based piece that automatically selects random images and displays them on the gallery wall, and the Internet version that offers the viewer a next and back button with which to scroll through and reverse the sequence so that they can return and reconsider the images. The second, Internet-based work allows the viewer to cheat a little bit, giving them the opportunity to think through the sequence and rework the narrative as it unfurls.
Permlink: http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=302

Artwork by Kate Armstrong
Artwork Title - Why Some Dolls Are Bad
Review by Eliza Fernbach
Review Title - Dolls behaving truly madly, but not really badly…
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Why Some Dolls are Bad invites the user to a collection of streamed images culled from the Internet, which take on random editorial positions in the frame of an original text written by Armstrong. The result- a bespoke book for the users of Facebook, an infinite precipitation of stirred structure. A ribald evolving commentary on our world of Good and Bad dolls. The same page never appears twice but the user can capture and save a favorite page. This is an intriguing re-enactment of the experience of reading a narrative book where particular passages haunt the imagination and are saved to our cognitive hard drive.
Permlink: http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=301

SwanQuake - the user manual
Artists - Igloo
Review by by Rob Myers
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SwanQuake - the user manual, is a collection of essays regarding a major interactive virtual installation art project by igloo (Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli) and their collaborators. SwanQuake is, as its name suggests, a meeting of computer game technology and dance. It consists of a series of interactive virtual environments built using the Unreal Engine 3D game system and populated by characters animated using motion capture techniques. Edited by Scott deLahunta. Essays by Johannes Birringer, Helen Stuckey, Shiralee Saul, Bruno Martelli, Ruth Gibson, John McCormick, Katharine Neil, Alex Jevremovic, Adam Nash, Helen Sloan, Stephen Turk,
Marco Gillies, Harry Brenton & David Surman.
Permlink: http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=300

Other Info:

If you are interested in reviewing for Furtherfield or have media art related projects, exhibitions that you wish to have featured or reviewed, please contact: marc.garrett [at] furtherfield.org

:: Open Ear ::

Open Ear (http://openear.wordpress.com/) is a loose collaborative group formed in 2006 by Paul Adams, Garrett Lynch and Matt Wright with the purpose of creating audio-visual art and organising live events within club, gallery, open air or site-specific venues.

:: Open Ear - Cardiff 13/06/08, open call for works ::

On June 13th 2008, Open Ear will host a free one night only event of experimental work in the ATRiuM Theatre at the University of Glamorgan’s newly built ATRiuM, Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries, Cardiff, Wales (http://cci.glam.ac.uk/). Curated by Garrett Lynch (http://www.asquare.org/) the event will present a series of interdisciplinary performances and projections by various artists.

Sound and visual artists / groups working across the areas of art, music, media and new technologies within live performance / projected contexts are invited to contribute to this event under an open theme.

What does this mean?

There is no imposed theme instead we want to present a selection of time-based work by artists based on their themes, their continuing research, as an event which will explore the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of audio-visual arts. Proposed performances / projected works can be new or pre-existing works, improvised, dynamically generated (such as software art) or pre-composed, abstract or figurative, individual or collaborative, experimental, site specific and much, much more. All proposals are required to be:

1. time-based (remember this is a audience based event in a theatre)
2. and ether audio-visual, audio only or visual only work (selection preference will be given to works which are audio-visual)

Works should aim to be a maximum of 30 minutes each however this is flexible.

As the event is free we are unable to offer individual payment to artists however we will provide access to reasonable requests for equipment (please include a list of requirements in your proposal and we will attempt to cater for this) at the venue and of course the opportunity to present work in one of Cardiff’s newest cutting edge venues.

Proposals should take the form of a word / pdf / rtf / txt document (two pages maximum) with:

1. A description of the work (500 words maximum).
2. Images to give us an idea of the proposed work.
3. A full list of required equipment (please note that the event will host several performers so complex configurations involving lengthy set-up times will not be catered for).
4. Urls to previous examples of work online (videos or sound files online are particularly useful).
5. A short bio (200 words maximum).
6. Artist(s) / group / performer(s) name and full contact details.

Please email proposals as compressed attachments (.zip / .dmg / .sit / .sitx / tar.gz / .tgz) to Garrett Lynch (garrett [at] asquare dot org) no later than 12pm (GMT), Friday 16/05/08.

To get an idea of the type of events we organise please see our website (http://openear.wordpress.com/
) for full details of all past events and our YouTube account (http://ie.youtube.com/openeargroup) for videos of pasts events.

:: The Venue ::

The University of Glamorgan’s newly built ATRiuM in Cardiff, Wales opened in 2007 and houses the Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries which comprises of Art & Design, Media & Communication and Drama & Music. Situated in central Cardiff, Wales, this specially-designed building contains cutting edge technology and facilities including industry-standard studios, a theatre and cinema.

Address: ATRiuM Theatre, Adam Street, Cardiff, Wales, CF24 2FN

Detailed information on how to get here can be found on the university website (http://www.glam.ac.uk/visiting#atrium).

Open Ear, audio-visual events and performances are supported by The University of Glamorgan, ATRiuM, Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries, Cardiff, Wales.