<nettime-ann> Interactivity/Information/Interfaces/Immersion (Frankfurt, Oct 24-26, 2007)

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

.
I4: Interactivity / Information / Interfaces / Immersion

International Research Conference
J W Goethe University
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology

Organized by the Research Network for Media Anthropology / FAME 
Frankfurt

October 24–26, 2007

Even before the emergence of social software, web logs and wikis, it 
was clear that digital communication technologies are, in essence, 
complex social software programs with the power to change people’s 
perception, the way people experience their environment, their ability 
to abstract, their rules of trust, and much more besides. Whereas the 
1980s and 1990s were marked by “quasi-social” connections between 
people that occurred en passant, by strategies of urban artistic 
“repurposing” (Digital Amsterdam), by a conspiracy of Internet-using 
consumers, and by a user-based cyber society, the situation has now 
changed fundamentally.

There has been a shift from technology-driven systems to media-driven 
systems and then to user/project-generated content. As the empiricism 
of the artificial becomes a global given, social, cultural, economic 
and political frames of reference are shifting. Countless new and 
unparalleled means of modeling social factors are emerging within a 
mesh of agencies around the world. Digital natives – those who have 
grown up with computer and internet applications – have spawned a 
societal and cultural paradigm shift. Societal and cultural geography 
is being extended by a global scenography of cultural artifacts. 
However, this raises important issues concerning the logic of the 
continuity of interaction, of a reliable and sustained presence, of 
adaptive learning and abstraction – issues that have become social 
markers in the programming, utilization, and onward development of 
applications, platforms and environments.

Increasingly, today’s designs and programs for digital worlds face the 
challenge of delivering complex, multisensory, transcultural, and 
global interaction capabilities in a robust technology-based 
environment. The changes are creating a need for the explicit modeling 
of human collaboration and cultural interaction which, increasingly, is 
causing software production to move out of the high-tech niche of 
computer science and media design into the realm of cultural and social 
anthropology. At the same time, there is a growing need to know more 
about the logic of construction (v. Glaserfeld) of culture and to be 
able to apply that knowledge. The need for explicit and programmable 
cultural concepts is moving closer to the science of the artificial as 
proposed by Herbert A. Simon and echoes Norbert Elias’s call for the 
scientific presentation of a developmental theory of abstraction.

Clearly, it would be wrong to assume that explicit, programmed models 
for collaboration, the creation of cultures, abstraction and artificial 
environments can eradicate the complexities of chance relationships, 
interaction, imagination, fiction, routine, or forgetfulness. 
Nonetheless, the possibilities they offer will be changed fundamentally 
by the emergence of programmed worlds and environments. All over the 
globe, artificial cybernetic spaces are something now taken for 
granted. Computer technology is designed to be ubiquitous, and the 
direct control of computers by means of brain waves is supplanting 
control by means of a pointing device or the human eye. Presence and 
telepresence, key concepts in earlier research, are receding into the 
background with the advent of computer technologies which can be 
inserted under the skin, into clothing, and into the eyes and ears or 
can generate realities in their own right without which the frames of 
reference of today’s and tomorrow’s realities will become meaningless. 
Ten years ago, S. Jones asked, “Where are we when we are online?” and 
J. Meyrowitz noted “being elsewhere.” Electronic games, e-sports, and 
around a billion people working in countless local area networks all 
exist in a vireality (M. Klein). What are the living, communication and 
working circumstances in these virealities? How should virtual spaces 
be designed in order to provide sufficiently complex environments for 
perception, design, decision-making, routine, trust, etc.? 

The > I4 < International Conferenceaddresses the emergence of complex 
collaboration and community software.

We assume that all human sensory and mental capabilities and the 
ability to abstract, conceive and implement things are, and have been, 
involved in the development of human ability to use media.

The concept of media encompasses perception, abstraction, storage, 
rules for the retention of information – of texts and holytexts, the 
great sagas, manifestations of cultural memory – and progression beyond 
existing knowledge paradigms. It is impossible to determine how 
perception and interaction will impact on media, either qualitatively 
or quantitatively. If the notion of a uniting organization is seen as a 
selection method or principle, the weight of these ideas becomes clear. 
They show that every form of interactive reciprocity is a selector and 
that the uniting force of interactivity lies in the definition of 
selection, distribution and retention criteria. This applies to 
methods of hearing, reading, writing, tasting, thinking, making music, 
and much more besides.

Increasingly, we expect and demand more from media – more information, 
more breadth of choice, more freedom of choice, more world, more 
closeness, more entertainment, more biography, more community: We want 
media to address us, entertain us, inform us. This is about more than 
consuming media. Our sense of reality has long since been subsumed into 
a sense of media; our sense of reality is embodied in our sense of 
media. We take the world presented through media seriously, we 
recognize the reality of information; we trust the information and the 
rules that make it credible.

The conference will be devoted to questions surrounding digital 
environments and the technology-based generation of cultural patterns 
in four areas: Interactivity / Information / Interfaces / Immersion

We invite submissions which explore these issues and offer answers to 
such questions as:

What connections can we currently identify between software development 
and cultural evolution? What significance can be attached to 
co-evolutionary processes in perception, abstraction, forms of 
virtualization, digital technologies and communication capabilities? 
What kinds of virtual spaces are developing? How are digital 
communication spaces influencing urbanization processes and the 
architecture of buildings? What significance does game software have in 
creating new social and cultural contexts? What kinds of cooperative 
and collaborative processes are developing? What are the defining 
properties of an explicit model of social constructs in a 
technology-based media environment? How are means of digital 
communication influencing children’s and adults’ living spaces and 
interior architecture? How can a transition from the idiocy of the 
masses and the knowledge of the crowd into a knowledge-generating 
virtual community be explained? Can we see signs of an emerging virtual 
civilization? How will network-integrated community building be 
important in the future? How are learning and the structure and 
legitimation of knowledge changing?

Please submit ideas for topics and papers (500 words max.) by March 31, 
2007

Initiators and contacts:

Prof. Manfred Faßler
FAME – Frankfurt/ Research Network for Media Anthropology
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology
J W. Goethe University
fasslermanfred@aol.com

Dr. Mark Mattingley-Scott
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology
J W. Goethe University
scott@de.ibm.com

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