Re: [-empyre-] panelism and conferencism
The issue I was seeking to raise was not ISEA's finances (it may have a smaller budget than ANAT - which is modest as well, with one and a bit employees) but with the financial and structural models underpinning it. In some important respects these are similar to the International Olympic Committee - and as we have recently seen, this is a model open to corruption, nepotism and autocratic governance. I am not suggesting ISEA is in anyway corrupt, nepotistic or autocratic, but there only needs to be the potential for, or the appearance of, such factors for alarm bells to start ringing. Working in a large public institution where, from time to time, I am involved in governance, I am all too aware of these issues. You have to ensure your systems are incorruptible and are seen to be so. I know that ISEA board members offer their time and energy for free and that the chair (and their institution) receive little reward for the substantial work they have to put in. I do not know what the tax levied on hosts is as a percentage of event gross turnover but assume it is calculated fairly. However, that is an assumption I am making, based on trust, and that is not the same as being fully transparent. The point I am making is that if ISEA needs reform then the place to start is in its structure and financial model. I think that a peer to peer model could work, although I am not proposing a detailed plan for how to do this. Michel may have some thoughts on how this could be done in a manner that assures transparency, inclusive governance and sustainability? best Simon On 21 Sep 2011, at 23:03, Cynthia Beth Rubin wrote: Hi Tracey, Melinda, and all: While I agree that is at the tipping point, the issue may be more one of panelism and conferism than of organizaton. ISEA is a facade, not a behemoth. There is no ISEA budget. There is barely an ISEA organization. There is a very part-time director who is paid in release time by her University. Each ISEA event is organized independently, and each ISEA event has to come up with its own funding, and then pay a small tax fo the organization, which covers minor office costs and publicity. I am not on the Board now, and cannot say how much this is, but it is tiny. Fees go to cover the actual ISEA. If there is other funding, great. If not, then people have to pay. There is no overflow from year to year. Unless people decide to work on fundraising, there simply are no funds. In fact, it is more lightweight than ANAT is, I believe, heavier than ISEA, so I am confused by Simon's post on this. The discussion on panelism is more interesting. Many people I spoke with submitted papers in the most traditional format - just as a way to come and participate. Do we need people presenting papers? What about brainstorming sessions? Organized discussions? I loved each of the keynote presenters - but they are expensive - they expect expenses to be paid. They are not necessarily a big draw - it is the chance to network and discussion that draw many of us here. This year I participated in a great AR workshop led by Hana Iverson and Sarah Drury. I met one attendee who reported that she only participated in workshops - that she never made it to Sabanci Center because the activities at the Sabanci U Communications were so great - workshops every day. What if we all came here not to show off what we do, but to learn? To take workshops, collaborate on projects, and actually make work by the end of the week? And if we did that with more local artists? Cynthia On Sep 21, 2011, at 7:36 AM, Tracey M Benson wrote: Well said Melinda, For me I have found some the most interesting discussions have come via lists like -empyre- as at the conference there has not been much of an opportunity as time has been so compressed I have had a great time at ISEA and think that some of the challenges in getting to venues illustrates the complexity of Istanbul, you have to go with it :-) What I feel I missed was a strong sense of the Turkish media arts community - I would have loved to see more Turkish work and discussion on local/regional issues. BTW - if anyone has the name of the artist who presented on the boat please let me know (he did the lovely projection work onto historic buildings). The organisers did a great job in pulling together a mammoth event despite all the challenges, and were very responsive to people concerns about the fees by lowering the pass price for non presenters (there was quite a bit of posting on nettime about this some months ago). I didn't get to catch up with half as many peeps as I wanted to and only about a quarter of the presentations. The big question - will people be attending future ISEA events? For sure! Well at least I will be :-) Cheers Tracey On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:59 PM, Melinda Rackham meli...@subtle.net wrote:
Re: [-empyre-] who owns the city? (Istanbul)
On a more mundane level, my friends and I went to dinner at a kebap house, the first one in Istanbul. And, as we enjoyed the meal, they mentioned that there was a downside to kebap restaurants, and that was that they were delicious, inexpensive, and hearty but that they were crowding out the Ottoman cuisine, with all of its widely varied flavors and laborious techniques. They then added that the traditional food of Istanbul was the refinement of many years of hybridization, reflecting the general uneasiness of change, modernity, and cosmopolitanism. It was a regionally specific version of the debates about fast food culture (convenience, taste, expense), but one that I could very easily relate to, but never would have even noticed had I not been staying with Turkish friends. Davin On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I was there a week only but all ppl I met (Turks everyone) told me they felt the turkization and the erasing of the Byzantine past, very well related in the book From the Holy Mountain, by William Dalrymple. He did a trip between the monasteries in Syria, Palestina and Turkey and saw the intentionality of the erasing of all traces of former cultures. Did you enter the Hagia Sofia? Crumbling away with zero maintenance... Ana On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Michel Bauwens mic...@p2pfoundation.net wrote: hi Ana, just wondering why you feel 'all the remnants of the past are crumbling away' ? On the contrary, I feel the successive layers of history are very much alive, and also the mixity of the population and the neighborhoods , with so many recent first-generation immigrants from the rural Anatolian countryside, represent quite a mixture of temporalities, etc ... very unlike western europe, where only the buildings remain ... extented families and village cooperative solidarity also remain realities, as far as I could ascertain from speaking with Turkish friends (I gave a lecture to an all-turkish audience yesterday) Michel On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 6:36 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I am bit curious about how did the people who travelled to Istanbul for the first time experienced the city itself, Turkey and all the contradictions and the multiple layers of meaning residing in this old city where all the remnants of it's past are crumbling away. As you know many Turks want to be a part of Europe and join the EC, but many others want keep the country's isolation. Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia1585353 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia, wi mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens55; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15853 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] can we avoid the corporate pyramid scheme model: independents
I'd just say that Cynthia and Somaya's posts are not actually far less interesting than other content to me; they speak to the material resources that allow the emergence of the intellectual and aesthetic formations we situate our practice within. It's easy enough to critique this or that mode of operation, and both easy and difficult critiques should take place, as neither aesthetic nor academic modes have much to offer without the culture of critique. But as anyone in the organisational hotseat knows, the pragmatics that underpin organisational/institutional exigencies do not always conform with one's best hopes for praxis. The question then becomes, what are the values that underpin the pragmatic decisions that must be made? In my experience these often sit with an individual (Director/Producer) and their team, sometimes inexplicitly. Some of my favourite events have been organised by people who have been the least explicit about the formal aspects of their organisation - the event itself has had the imprimatur of their aesthetic that can perhaps be captured in a write-up, but usually you had to be there. The base of the resources going into an event like ISEA appear to me to be the in-kind contributions from various academically-affiliated practitioners who then require certain kinds of participation (papers) in order to be able to contribute those resources of their time and travel; and these lend a certain cover to the much more variable economics of putting together the exhibitions. There are of course other models for an ISEA-like event (the biennial or art fair symposium; the residency; the think tank; the UN-style colloquium; the wholly independent free gathering) but these seem to me to require quite different structures than what ISEA currently does. I think that a continuing discussion about those structures could be extremely useful, not just (mainly?) for ISEA but for those of us who are/have been/will be involved in different ways in bringing practitioners together for events. Perhaps for that discussion ISEA should be a starting point or case study, rather tha n the destination? Cheers Danny -- http://www.dannybutt.net +64 21 456 379 On 22/09/2011, at 5:52 PM, Cynthia Beth Rubin wrote: The discussions on who owns the city are far more interesting than this one - so just one more post to clarify somethings about ISEA structure that I feel are needed to insure incorrect assumptions do not continue unchallenged. To continue thoughts of previous email - just because a few hard working people who give themselves over completely to a conference manage to pull it off successfully, you assume that there is a big huge organization with tons of money behind it. This is a bizarre assumption. Had they failed to create a successful event, would you have assumed otherwise? I agree that somethings need to be changed - but why blame the victim - that is people who worked night and day for months to pull off an event with almost no funding? Somaya - thanks for your comments here on organizing a huge event. They are right on. The tipping point is there because ISEA has gotten so popular and large that now the local artistic directors are forced to contract with outside companies who do much of the work that people attending a large academic conference expect --- providing badges, registration packets, tech support, etc. Personally I would prefer not to see this contracted out, but this would take, ironically, a larger organization. To clarify further: - ISEA is split between a small, lean, light-weight organization that is ongoing (one person who works one day a week through release time/in kind funding). - for ISEA2011, there were two local coordinators/directors who sacrificed to make it happen. The current website of ISEA is a bit out of date - because there have been no funds to update it. This site was done free of cost by Bonnie Mitchell and volunteers at Bowling Green University (it may have been a student project). I did the previous website working with some students in a workshop sponsored by the Rhode Island School of Design. The students could not finish the site during the workshop, so I stayed up for weeks finishing it myself, with no pay beyond what I was paid to teach the students. As a board member, I insisted on a multi-lingual site. . At one point ISEA did have paid staff in Montreal, so we had french version already, that made this seem possible. I farmed out the other translations to volunteers within ISEA, and did missing parts of the French myself (there may still be errors in that) and then plugged in translations by hand (we are talking 10 years ago, old HTML) Where translations are incomplete, it is because no volunteers came forward for those sections. Think of about the implications of the assumptions that any success must have
Re: [-empyre-] who owns the city? (Istanbul)
One evening we went to a restaurant (Aristane) that specialises in recreating or reinterpreting Ottoman cuisine. The dishes were dated (1473, 1620, 1701, etc). It wasn't cheap (eg: by UK standards it was approaching Michelin prices) but the food was fascinating, complex and in some instances astounding. If you are into serious cooking this would have pleased you. It was also out from the centre, quite a taxi ride. It was worth it. Memorable. Not a kebab in sight (there was a dish called a kebab - but it wasn't). best Simon On 22 Sep 2011, at 08:02, davin heckman wrote: On a more mundane level, my friends and I went to dinner at a kebap house, the first one in Istanbul. And, as we enjoyed the meal, they mentioned that there was a downside to kebap restaurants, and that was that they were delicious, inexpensive, and hearty but that they were crowding out the Ottoman cuisine, with all of its widely varied flavors and laborious techniques. They then added that the traditional food of Istanbul was the refinement of many years of hybridization, reflecting the general uneasiness of change, modernity, and cosmopolitanism. It was a regionally specific version of the debates about fast food culture (convenience, taste, expense), but one that I could very easily relate to, but never would have even noticed had I not been staying with Turkish friends. Davin On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I was there a week only but all ppl I met (Turks everyone) told me they felt the turkization and the erasing of the Byzantine past, very well related in the book From the Holy Mountain, by William Dalrymple. He did a trip between the monasteries in Syria, Palestina and Turkey and saw the intentionality of the erasing of all traces of former cultures. Did you enter the Hagia Sofia? Crumbling away with zero maintenance... Ana On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Michel Bauwens mic...@p2pfoundation.net wrote: hi Ana, just wondering why you feel 'all the remnants of the past are crumbling away' ? On the contrary, I feel the successive layers of history are very much alive, and also the mixity of the population and the neighborhoods , with so many recent first-generation immigrants from the rural Anatolian countryside, represent quite a mixture of temporalities, etc ... very unlike western europe, where only the buildings remain ... extented families and village cooperative solidarity also remain realities, as far as I could ascertain from speaking with Turkish friends (I gave a lecture to an all-turkish audience yesterday) Michel On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 6:36 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I am bit curious about how did the people who travelled to Istanbul for the first time experienced the city itself, Turkey and all the contradictions and the multiple layers of meaning residing in this old city where all the remnants of it's past are crumbling away. As you know many Turks want to be a part of Europe and join the EC, but many others want keep the country's isolation. Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia1585353 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia, wi mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens55; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15853 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh
Re: [-empyre-] who owns the city? (Istanbul)
Last week I was giving a lecture in Barcelona and bought Pamuk's book about Istanbul. Wonderful reading, references and essays. By the way, his project the Museum of the Innocence has suffered many delays and he was himself gone from Turkey for a while to avoid being in trial for his comments about the Turkish genocide of Armenians. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-185206-pamuks-museum-of-innocence-to-open-in-2010.html http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/The-museum-that-was-written-down/21427 Ana, who loves the merge of Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul... On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 9:02 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.comwrote: On a more mundane level, my friends and I went to dinner at a kebap house, the first one in Istanbul. And, as we enjoyed the meal, they mentioned that there was a downside to kebap restaurants, and that was that they were delicious, inexpensive, and hearty but that they were crowding out the Ottoman cuisine, with all of its widely varied flavors and laborious techniques. They then added that the traditional food of Istanbul was the refinement of many years of hybridization, reflecting the general uneasiness of change, modernity, and cosmopolitanism. It was a regionally specific version of the debates about fast food culture (convenience, taste, expense), but one that I could very easily relate to, but never would have even noticed had I not been staying with Turkish friends. Davin On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I was there a week only but all ppl I met (Turks everyone) told me they felt the turkization and the erasing of the Byzantine past, very well related in the book From the Holy Mountain, by William Dalrymple. He did a trip between the monasteries in Syria, Palestina and Turkey and saw the intentionality of the erasing of all traces of former cultures. Did you enter the Hagia Sofia? Crumbling away with zero maintenance... Ana On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Michel Bauwens mic...@p2pfoundation.net wrote: hi Ana, just wondering why you feel 'all the remnants of the past are crumbling away' ? On the contrary, I feel the successive layers of history are very much alive, and also the mixity of the population and the neighborhoods , with so many recent first-generation immigrants from the rural Anatolian countryside, represent quite a mixture of temporalities, etc ... very unlike western europe, where only the buildings remain ... extented families and village cooperative solidarity also remain realities, as far as I could ascertain from speaking with Turkish friends (I gave a lecture to an all-turkish audience yesterday) Michel On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 6:36 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I am bit curious about how did the people who travelled to Istanbul for the first time experienced the city itself, Turkey and all the contradictions and the multiple layers of meaning residing in this old city where all the remnants of it's past are crumbling away. As you know many Turks want to be a part of Europe and join the EC, but many others want keep the country's isolation. Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia1585353 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia, wi mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens55; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15853 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Re: [-empyre-] who owns the city? (Istanbul)
Turkish cuisine eaten by the Caliphs was one of the most sofisticated kitchens in the world :) I was in Istanbul last year during the last week of Ramadan and we ate an Eid menu in a posh restaurang in an island, magnificent. Ana On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 2:31 AM, Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk wrote: One evening we went to a restaurant (Aristane) that specialises in recreating or reinterpreting Ottoman cuisine. The dishes were dated (1473, 1620, 1701, etc). It wasn't cheap (eg: by UK standards it was approaching Michelin prices) but the food was fascinating, complex and in some instances astounding. If you are into serious cooking this would have pleased you. It was also out from the centre, quite a taxi ride. It was worth it. Memorable. Not a kebab in sight (there was a dish called a kebab - but it wasn't). best Simon On 22 Sep 2011, at 08:02, davin heckman wrote: On a more mundane level, my friends and I went to dinner at a kebap house, the first one in Istanbul. And, as we enjoyed the meal, they mentioned that there was a downside to kebap restaurants, and that was that they were delicious, inexpensive, and hearty but that they were crowding out the Ottoman cuisine, with all of its widely varied flavors and laborious techniques. They then added that the traditional food of Istanbul was the refinement of many years of hybridization, reflecting the general uneasiness of change, modernity, and cosmopolitanism. It was a regionally specific version of the debates about fast food culture (convenience, taste, expense), but one that I could very easily relate to, but never would have even noticed had I not been staying with Turkish friends. Davin On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I was there a week only but all ppl I met (Turks everyone) told me they felt the turkization and the erasing of the Byzantine past, very well related in the book From the Holy Mountain, by William Dalrymple. He did a trip between the monasteries in Syria, Palestina and Turkey and saw the intentionality of the erasing of all traces of former cultures. Did you enter the Hagia Sofia? Crumbling away with zero maintenance... Ana On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Michel Bauwens mic...@p2pfoundation.net wrote: hi Ana, just wondering why you feel 'all the remnants of the past are crumbling away' ? On the contrary, I feel the successive layers of history are very much alive, and also the mixity of the population and the neighborhoods , with so many recent first-generation immigrants from the rural Anatolian countryside, represent quite a mixture of temporalities, etc ... very unlike western europe, where only the buildings remain ... extented families and village cooperative solidarity also remain realities, as far as I could ascertain from speaking with Turkish friends (I gave a lecture to an all-turkish audience yesterday) Michel On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 6:36 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I am bit curious about how did the people who travelled to Istanbul for the first time experienced the city itself, Turkey and all the contradictions and the multiple layers of meaning residing in this old city where all the remnants of it's past are crumbling away. As you know many Turks want to be a part of Europe and join the EC, but many others want keep the country's isolation. Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia1585353 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia, wi mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens55; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15853 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to
Re: [-empyre-] can we avoid the corporate pyramid scheme model: independents
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Thanks for the clarification on the structure. This is not entirely clear from the website and it would be good to have it there...but of course I understand the severe lack of financial and institutional (academic or otherwise) to provide time and resources for this. As someone who has organized numerous smaller public events over the past decade I certainly understand the extra time and money that goes into events such as this. My critiques should not be taken as attacks on the work of others. It still would be interesting to hear about the local budget from the local organizing committee. I do want to make clear that I don't assume any large organization with large amounts of resources behind it. My references to academic organizations in the US refer to the smaller ones: Society for Literature, Science, and Art (SLSA) and the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S). With respect to 4S, the president and the editor of their journal are given some form of in-kind/time release (as far as I know); I don't know about other members of the organization. But both of these organizations are rather small, as far as academic societies in the US (such as MLA, AAA, CAA). Nevertheless, there is one major difference between these organizations and ISEA: they charge dues. While I do not want to produce another barrier to participation---far from it---I do wonder what would be possible if ISEA were to be a dues paying organization. How could the fees be structured to allow participation from those who might not be able to afford even a small amount? What could be possible with the extra funding from dues that is not possible now? Would it mean that artists would get their expenses covered, rather than just the keynote presenters? Would it mean that artists would not have to worry about their works being stuck in customs, as Kirsty Boyle had to (is still doing?)? If so, I would not hesitate to pay them. I raise this issue as a way of trying to think about how to create sustainable, organized networks. Would dues enable the community to have more control over decisions such as whether or not the conference takes place within a corporate entity? Or what what types of fee structure are created to the conference itself? These are nitty-gritty questions have have real operational impact. And the members of ISEA are certainly creative...there is no reason why decisions regarding these issues could not become an artistic project in itself. As others have mentioned, ISEA seems to be at a precarious position right now; there's no excuse for not thinking expansively regarding potential responses to the similar concerns we all share. nick On Thu, 22 Sep 2011, Cynthia Beth Rubin wrote: The discussions on who owns the city are far more interesting than this one - so just one more post to clarify somethings about ISEA structure that I feel are needed to insure incorrect assumptions do not continue unchallenged. To continue thoughts of previous email - just because a few hard working people who give themselves over completely to a conference manage to pull it off successfully, you assume that there is a big huge organization with tons of money behind it. This is a bizarre assumption. Had they failed to create a successful event, would you have assumed otherwise? I agree that somethings need to be changed - but why blame the victim - that is people who worked night and day for months to pull off an event with almost no funding? Somaya - thanks for your comments here on organizing a huge event. They are right on. The tipping point is there because ISEA has gotten so popular and large that now the local artistic directors are forced to contract with outside companies who do much of the work that people attending a large academic conference expect --- providing badges, registration packets, tech support, etc. Personally I would prefer not to see this contracted out, but this would take, ironically, a larger organization. To clarify further: - ISEA is split between a small, lean, light-weight organization that is ongoing (one person who works one day a week through release time/in kind funding). - for ISEA2011, there were two local coordinators/directors who sacrificed to make it happen. The current website of ISEA is a bit out of date - because there have been no funds to update it. This site was done free of cost by Bonnie Mitchell and volunteers at Bowling Green University (it may have been a student project). I did the previous website working with some students in a workshop sponsored by the Rhode Island School of Design. The students could not finish the site during the workshop, so I stayed up for weeks finishing it myself, with no pay beyond what I was paid to teach the students. As a board member, I insisted on a multi-lingual site. . At one point ISEA did have paid staff in Montreal, so we had french
Re: [-empyre-] can we avoid the corporate pyramid scheme model: independents
hello In the EU at least (where ISEA HQ is as I understand it) it is implicitly understood as minimum that a contributor's airfare and accommodation are covered. Very large festivals I've shown work in around the world do this: Japan Media Arts Festival, FILE (Brazil), Transmediale (Germany), Ars Electronica (Austria) not to mention a few dozen smaller festivals I've shown at over the years. Many even pay a fee on top. Why? Perhaps they understand that a rigorous, diverse electronic arts scene greatly benefits from makers and thinkers being able to share and demonstrate their work. very important theme. workshops and activities going beyond the presentation of results, providing tools and methodologies should really be financially supported. Independents often work outside institutions (or diagonally across them) and thus cannot benefit from the backing coming from them, and yet they provide an incredible value. Or, as it happens more and more, even people in institutions start having difficulties finding money to offer workshops and to show work. I bring myself as an one example among many of us: in our faculty in Rome they performed an incredible amount of cuts this year and at the beginning of september I was faced with the impossibility of attending two meetings in Finland for which arrangements had already been made. The generous support offered by the Designs on E-Learning conference in Helsinki will allow me to go there and perform a workshop in which people will be able to use a new computer vision technology to create innovative ubiquitous learning environments, and they will be able to bring it back home to use it on their projects. This is a great value, as it is in all the cases in which people are supported to bring their research with them and facilitate other people to gain knowledge and to use new tools. I would like to stress again a very successful model we are experimenting here in Italy: in our workshops (for example the Read/Write Reality workshop on ubiquitous publishing we held in the south of italy right before ISEA) people could benefit from the social room: a limited number of attendees have been granted with full financial support in exchange for services offered to the workshop, ranging from audio/video documentation, tutoring support for participants, articles and communication, volunteering activities of various kinds, and specific workshop sessions leveraging their skills and personal researches. This is both a way to support people and to give value to their researches, and also to create a feeling of doing things together, of feeling part of an etherogeneous, international community sharing ethics and a plan. best, Salvatore --- Salvatore Iaconesi prof. Cross Media Design University of Rome La Sapienza Faculty of Architecture Dept. of Industrial Design salvatore.iacon...@artisopensource.net xdxd.vs.x...@gmail.com salvat...@fakepress.net skype: xdxdVSxdxd --- Art is Open Source http://www.artisopensource.net --- FakePress http://www.fakepress.it ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
