Syneme’s aim is to explore artistic practices that are enabled and enriched by networked digital technologies (particularily those that allow real-time engagment between participants) and to ask ” how can we use the network itself as an artistic instrument – not merely a distribution channel.”

To explore such questions Syneme has focused on the development of Artsmesh, a platform that makes expressive telepresence on high-speed research networks possible.

Kenneth Fields is the group’s director.

Originally from the USA, fields received a Ph.D. in Media Arts from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000 before moving to Beijing to assist with the establishment and development of media arts programs and curriculum in some of the country’s top institutions including China’s Central Conservatory of Music and Peking University.

An advocate for research-creation, Field’s own domain of practice lies within the area of telematic arts, specifically digital music, while focusing theoretically on issues related to ontology and the technology of inquiry. As well as write and perform his own electroacoustic compositions, Fields has been involved in several sound installations and networked performances internationally, has developed collaborative online work environments for students, and has published widely. He is also co-organiser of the Musicacoustica Festival, Beijing.

Perceiving the Internet to be more than a conduit of communication, but also a medium for artistic creation, performance, exploration and experimentation, at the University of Calgary Fields focuses on building high-speed networks that facilitate live, real-time interaction between participants operating within various media (be they musical, visual, physical, etc), thus establishing dynamic collaborative environments that are not tied to one location, but exist in multiple places at once.

ThoughtMesh was conceived as an effort to overstep the limitations associated with academia’s currency of the peer-reviewed print journal, which can be viewed as an isolating and outdated medium for distribution of intellectual discourse in our increasingly networked environment. Operating via a tag-based navigation system, ThoughtMesh allows users to instantly locate excerpts within essays that deal specifically with the subject matter they are wishing to research. For example, within an essay dealing with a wider topic within new media, a researcher may select the tag ‘interactivity’ to be presented with direct excerpts from the essay that deal with this subject matter. Beyond this, users may also view from a list of sections of other essays throughout the mesh that also share this tag.

ThoughtMesh presents itself as an avenue for scholars to tap into and participate in flows of information Twittering and Flickring across the world. It is also an ideal way for academics specializing in digital culture to situate their discourse within the culture itself. ThoughtMesh’s system of fluid distribution bears benefits when compared to single repository databases in that it interconnects essays and authors beyond their affiliations with single institutions or isolated networks and websites. Users are given the option of submitting their work directly into ThoughtMesh’s database, or simply tagging essays as they are published on a remote website.

This essay by John Ippolito outlines the intended aims and outcomes of the ThoughtMesh project.

An artist-led group that utilizes networked media to create, explore, nurture and promote the art that happens when connections are made and knowledge is shared – across the boundaries of established art-world institutions and their markets, grass-roots artistic and activist projects and communities of socially-engaged software developers. This is a spectrum that engages from the maverick media-art-makers and small collectives of cross-specialist practitioners, to projects that critique and change dominant hierarchical structures as part of their art process.

Furtherfield

Whilst developing an online studio of work at devoid, together with commercial projects and interactive design and programming for arts organisations, he works extensively with Furtherfield, an London/net based artists collective, using the internet and networked technology as a focal point for creative discourse, events and production. Projects including Visitors Studio and FurtherStudio (an online artists residency programming) and ‘Skin/Strip Online’ (a collaboration between Furtherfield and Completely Naked, commissioned by BBC Shooting Live Artists 2003).

Neil also teaches and held the position of Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media at Bath Spa University (Graphic & Screen Design) from 2000 to 2008.

Visit his website www.devoid.co.uk

Users can upload and download a variety of raw and processed, unmixed and remixed audio, video, images and text all under various incarnations of Creative Commons. The site is divided into user accounts or profiles which have information and background about the user (much like existing social media sites) and where they upload their work, name, categorise, genrify (well ‘genrification’ is a word) and tag it for perusal by site member and non-members, but also importantly to act as source material for further downloading and reworking and remixing by other members. There are also ‘projects’ which are works in progress at any one time which on site members can collaborate and also the capacity to search members by skills and interest areas for collaboration and networking etc.

There are certainly many interesting questions raised here in the production of open-source new media content and related aesthetic concerns and the ways that these might intesect with a national-scale broadcast media network, and the various kinds of feedback (social, technical, cultural) within the network ecologies that may emerge from or be drawn into this.

Another question to investigate would be how might the relationship between the metadata such as tags, genres, geolocation etc and the actual AV/text content on the site be used in other innovative and interesting and dynamic ways?

There are some interesting people on the project who might be worth talking to:

The Pool Team

Editorial:

Executive producer: Sherre DeLys

“Sherre DeLys has developed playful dialogues with some of her favourite writers and musicians to create radio art which displays an intense regard for listeners’ own imaginative involvement. She has collaborated with sculptor Joan Grounds for more than a decade– their sound sculptures enter into a call-and-response with the botanical environments they inhabit.”

Producers:

John Jacobs – John is an ABC broadcaster, social media activist, electronic and mechanical inventor, bike rider, vegan cook, performer, promoter, composer, and enthusiastic life hacker. He is a founding member of the Indymedia movement and also part of the team that devised and produces Radio National’s weekly remix program, The Night Air.

Gretchen Miller – Gretchen Miller is a writer, radio producer, composer and maker of audio arts. She works at ABC Radio National. Her work has been broadcast in Germany and France and reworked for live performance at the Studio, Sydney Opera House. She has a passion for travelling into the Australian inland, camping rough and collecting sounds from the natural world, tales that float across the landscape.

Pool education consortium:

Ross Gibson, Norie Neumark, Shannon O’Neill, and Darrall Thompson from University of Technology, Sydney; Marius Foley from RMIT; Brogan Bunt and Terumi Narushima from University of Wollongong; Tom Ellard from UNSW College of Fine Arts.

Also: the Production Manager is a person called Peter Jackson – ?

Screenshot from ‘Assemblage for Collective Thought’ VJ and networked remix project. Performed at International Symposium for Electronic Arts and ZeroOne, San Jose, USA, August 12 2006.

Dynamic Media: Innovative Social and Artistic Development in New Media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990 is an international, ARC funded project that provides information for Australians to more extensively implement dynamic media within a social context. Based at the Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, the project is a collaboration between Anna Munster (CoFA/CCAP), Andrew Murphie (Media, Film & Theatre, UNSW), Brian Massumi (University of Montreal) and Adrian MacKenzie (Lancaster University).The project focuses on the international strategies for social use of dynamic media, and will form the basis of an online database that will profile and be accessible to Australian artists, arts organisations, new media researchers and social innovators. This study highlights the innovation of Australian artists and researchers in the development of dynamic media and positions these internationally.

Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics, College of Fine Arts, UNSW