Distributed Creativities Program Schedule!

Conference Schedule

11:00 am
Breakfast

11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Welcome

Panel 1: The Collective and the Common

Nate Harrison
Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

Fare Use: A Political Economy of the Digital Subject

Through an assessment of todayʼs “digital subject” this paper addresses the relationship between the historical category “authorship” and contemporary modes of cultural production. The paper postulates that the “death of the author” ushered in through post-structuralist theory decades ago, in conjunction with the current widespread use of networking technologies in art and design, could be interpreted as having yielded a liberated reader-as-producer. However, this is not entirely the case. Powerful interests who have mediated access to the means of production since the “broadcast era” (and have likewise established their own models of cultural consumption) continue to wrest control away from potential creators through intellectual property regimes and, more alarmingly, through digital rights management (DRM) at the technological level.
The paper tries to balance two theoretical approaches: a political economy model (i.e., “what do media do to audiences?”) and a text-audience model (“what do audiences do with media?”). On the one hand, it must be acknowledged that through evolving technology the creative domain and the possibilities of those within it have changed, rendering somewhat obsolete Frankfurt School-style media criticism. On the other hand, a more contemporary analysis should not come at the expense of abandoning the economic realities of production. Readers only become themselves author-producers, and thrive, when they have unfettered access to creativityʼs raw materials– to the texts made available by previous authors. And those materials are only available when egalitarian flows of information are assured, free from regulation that privileges capital. Yet these flows are often inhibited, in a preemptive manner, giving advantage to the already established captains of media industry (or robber barons, depending on your point of view) whose motives are often driven by profit rather than a consideration of healthy democratic exchange through freedom of information. It is an evaluation of the techno-legal structures that make the blurring of original/imitation, author/reader, and producer/consumer possible–in essence the structures that make new modes of creative expression possible–that the paper will put forward in order to understand what
is at stake in 21st century authorship.

Krystal Hauseur
Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine

Misreading Abstraction: "The New Sculpture" of Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu

This presentation examines the work of three Nisei women artists during the postwar period. Their work successfully negotiated the boundary separating art and craft through their innovative use of form, process, and material. Historically, their work received positive attention within craft criticism for its innovative form and technical skill, while the artworld excluded craft, women, and non-U.S. influences from its discursive narrative and market. Also, at this time, craft attempted to shed its non-art status by adopting formalism, the language of high modernism by its most renowned critic Clement Greenberg. Because the dominant mythology of masculine-artist, virile-genius veiled the reception of art during this period, it misread these artists’ work through their femininity, Asianness, and naïveté. By examining this complex history, this presentation demonstrates how Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu navigated within optic and haptic viewing theories and broke through the politics of their identities.

Faculty Response: Dr Grant Kester
Questions and Panel Discussion

1:00 pm - 2:00pm
Lunch

2:00 pm -3:30 pm
Panel 2 : Transdisciplinary Motion

David Benin
Communication, University of California, San Diego

Coding Affect: Transdisciplinary Digital Creation and the Problem of Boundaries

Hors Catégorie: An Experiment in Embodied, Affective Interactive Fiction (2007) is a work of digital media that attempts to shift the emphasis of IF works from narrative development to affective response. The work is the result of collaboration between a Communication scholar and digital artist and a Computer Science scholar and programmer. In this presentation, I, one of the authors of the digital work, discuss this process of collaboration, which was central to instilling some of the tensions we hoped would result into the final work. In particular, the project explored the challenge of expressing open-ended, undefined qualities – affects that arise from bodily interaction – through the development of a quantitative code versatile and flexible enough to engender suitably indeterminate interactions. Or, how does one do the analogic – affect – through digital code? My presentation focuses, then, on issues of translation and creation across technical and disciplinary boundaries. I explore most intently issues of language, epistemology, and design, examining the communicative strategies and a priori employed by collaborators to articulate both possibility and, more importantly, limitation, in the development of an experimental digital work. Given the project’s preoccupation with challenging the ability of digital code to generate truly new forms – the Bergsonian distinction between ‘the possible’ and ‘the potential’ – establishing, overcoming, and, indeed re-affirming epistemological, disciplinary, and technical assumptions proved the most compelling aspect of this collaboration. The aim of my presentation is to offer insight into collaboration that reaches across disciplinary divides and to suggest tools for the translation of ‘non-technical,’ humanistic theoretical salvos into discrete, technical procedures.


Christina Baker
Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, University of California, San Diego

“No Es lo Mismo” en la Ciudad de México: Exploring the Body, Repetition and Mimicry in Salsa’s Live (Re)-Performance
This paper considers how the live salsa musical performance in Mexico City serves as an example of how cultural productions transcend national boundaries to become adopted, adapted and appropriated to fit specific societal needs. Within the Mexico City context it is important to note that the primary transmission of salsa is performed by cover bands that generally do not write or perform their own original compositions. Rather, the songs that reverberate throughout the dance halls in the capital city can be heard played by almost any local band on any given night. The limited song repertoire may be indicative of how Mexico City has been exposed to commercialized, commodified salsa that inhibits complex compositional and obscures the historical development of salsa. What is at stake in evaluating the presence of cover artists are that they may provide insight into how salsa’s musical integration into Mexico City’s soundscape reflects general trends regarding salsa’s presence throughout the republic. Specifically, this paper will evaluate how the live salsa musical performance in Mexico City expresses the lack of musical training necessary to allow salsa to be originally produced and integrated into a national archive and/or repertoire, becomes a microcosm for exploring the way Mexico adopts and imitates salsa’s music devoid it cultural and historical context and demonstrates how the repetition of popular, commercialized salsa hits creates familiarity for salsa’s participants through a scripted corporal memories.
Faculty Response: Ricardo Dominguez
Questions and Panel Discussion

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Keynote Address: Rick Lowe

Closing and Reception