implicit art

First up:
Now and again I decide it may be time to explore new things. Well, theory is not exactly new to me, but I don’t plan on going back and re-categorizing every post in my whole blog (nearly 600 entries to date!). Point? New category of posts on this blog is “theory,” and this here is the first entry.

Local scholar (OK, she’s also my wife) Nicole Ridgway presented this week’s WSOA paper, entitled in excess of the already constituted: interaction as performance. It was a fake debate, as provocation, between the two most prolific (in my not so humble opinion) new media philosopher / theorists around today – Brian Massumi and Mark Hansen.

Aside from the case studies of Bill Viola, in order to take a look at the performed vs the preformed in the “emerging space” of interaction, the most interesting thing Nicole did was in and around her respondents. Rather than asking for the standard academic response, she got local artists to talk about how they might apply its concepts in their work.

A great discussion ensued, and even carried on into a bar through much later that evening. A short version of said paper will eventually be online at http://inter-disciplinary.net/, and the full chapter will be published by Rodopi press later this year.