Gallery Show and Videos from the Digital Arts Festival
The Digital Arts Festival continues in the Carleton Art Gallery with "State of the Art: Maps, Stories, Games and Algorithms from Minnesota," curated by Steve Dietz. Not to be missed. Also check the short videoclips by Festival presenters at the left.
Jennifer Yorke, Printmaker: Andrew Bartels & Karina Hill
Be A Digitial Director: Wade Johnson & Matt Swanson
Dave Ryan & Pat Kelley's Enging Room: Adam Hoel & Andy Evans
Blogging 101: Katie Visco & Shelley Getzendanner
1: Art is an experience induced by the ideas communicated through the language of forms. Only the spiritual is important, but only the material exists. Objects are mere representations of ideas: they serve as a direct expression of our hope for art, and are not the art itself.
The digital game industry is currently valued at over $6 billion a year, yet academic understanding of the role of games in society has only recently moved beyond concerns over violence and aggression in children to considering other areas of interest. Some early research has suggested that girls and women are underrepresented as central characters in games, and that most times, the females that are present are stereotypical in dress, appearance, movement and roles. 
industry itself needs careful consideration and larger structural change if it is to become a place more welcoming to women and a source of entertainment that meets the needs of more than a core demographic of adolescent males. This talk demonstrates how various industry structures still exist as barriers to better integration of the gaming industry. Such elements as work week expectations, company recruitment tools and practices, genre limitations and the increasingly conservative views of game publishers, for example, all play into a system that discourages not only the role and presence of women in the game industry, but innovation and change in that industry as well. There are ways out of this dilemma, which I address in closing.
Mia Consalvo, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Telecommunications at Ohio University. Her research area includes the study of new media and popular culture, with a focus on the digital games industry. Her current work examines women gamers as well as the growing peripheral aspects of the game industry, including publishers of strategy guides, creators of technological enhancements such as the GameShark, and player-created versions of the same items. 
"In my work I examine the tension between public space and private identity. Through manipulations of familiar images, I suggest that our public and private selves are not easily reconciled.
Despite the poverty of these images, the rigid conventions of portrait photography make them recognizable. Seven Strained Smiles is an examination of the aggressive, alienating element of self-presentation. These small images of the nose and mouth area of yearbook portraits float on large sheets of paper. The grimacing, unrecognizable sitters are isolated from each other by this expansive boarder, which amplifies their own efforts at self-presentation. The viewer must remain at a distance in order to see all seven images at once; the small images, however, are impossible to read from this distance. As a result, the isolation of the images from each other is extended to the viewer."
Filmmaker Chuck Olsen has amassed over 30 hours of interviews with the prime movers and shakers in the world of Weblogs, or "blogs." He will present edited sections from the film and lead an open discussion of ways in which this new form of "we media" is giving everyone a personal voice and transforming journalism. If you are interested in creating your own weblog, Chuck will give you some advice on software and how to get started. Chuck Olsen is the webmaster for Twin Cities Public Television.
Dave Ryan graduated with a MFA in Film from Ohio University. His videos have gained recognition at some of the most important venues for video art including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Video Festival and the Locarno Video Art festival. He was selected for a 2003 Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship.
Patrick Kelley received his MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art. He is a 2001 recipient of a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photography. He is also a recipient of a Jerome/Blacklock Nature Sanctuary Fellowship Residency and a Jerome/Forecast Public Art Works Installation Commission for the Open Book Literary Arts Building in Minneapolis.
Recent developments in United States copyright law have reflected the agenda of an aggressive corporate mindset which regards all creative expression as intellectual property lacking in value unless it can be owned and commercially exploited. The result of many incremental steps, this approach may be viewed as an extreme manifestation of the Western mythos of the heroic individual as self-reliant originator. As such, it denies or obscures that fact that all art is to some degree derivative, and is dependent on collaboration with historic antecedents and living creative communities. This presentation urges respect for a robust Public Domain, and suggests ways in which creative people can both benefit from the Creative Commons and contribute to its flourishing as an alternative model.
"Director Doug Pray pays tribute to the innovative art of deejaying in the electrifying documentary 
In a performative presentation that is part narrative, part critical prose, and part poetry, Amato will explore how the digital sphere alters the materiality and urgency of our public and private transactions. The talk will constitute a demonstration, too, of how language may embody the shifting effects and affects of the digital.
"Specifically, there are at least two issues that I've grappled with of late in my own thinking and writing and making. First, I wonder to what extent an unedited sea of information (term used advisedly) can overload our collective capacity for making meaningful meanings (which is not solely a matter of developing more efficient navigational tools, not least because these tools generally help and hurt matters). Secondly, I wonder whether the tried & true binaries of print culture -- professional vs. amateur, academic vs. nonacademic, indie vs. mainstream -- are still useful in coping with the situation we now find ourselves in. My "we" is especially problematic, both because of increasing global disparities (access, sure, but e.g. hunger as well) and the many ecological and geopolitical consequences of our sprawling social habitats.
popular cultural backdrop for the print artifacts of the past half-century, whether novels, poems, plays, refrigerator manuals, or oils-on-velvet. And while our theories of media, for instance, like our economic theories, require a certain capacity for bracketing the particular aspect of reality under scrutiny, it's nonetheless the case that, taken at face value, isolating concerns can produce a somewhat distorted account. What's at stake, personally and politically, when Ahmad and Muriel initiate a transatlantic correspondence online about a collaborative arts project after having hooked up in a chat room decorated with animated banners and punctuated by the sounds of Phish?
Technology has long been a driving force in music, shaping and extending artists thoughts as well as their abilities. Each new instrument introduces new sounds and performance possibilities, which in turn affect the creative process. 
Jesse Kriss is currently a Masters student at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. He graduated from Carleton in 2003.
"These works are a digital synthesis of photographs and etchings. The photographs that I have taken whilst flying over the Kimberley, have been combined with the etchings that I have produced in response to that landscape. The integration of the real objective landscape, that is the photo, with the invented subjective landscape' representation, that is, the etching, allows me to visually reinvent and modify the landscape, to accentuate the structure, topography, horizontality and even sense of movement over the land. Like the processes of nature, erosion, eruption, the faulting and folding of subterranean forces, the digital modification of the landscape becomes the agent of change, a technological simile for the effects of time, movement in the formation of the landscape."
"Fata Morgana"
On June 1, 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."
For 
Robert Nideffer's 
Salen: Of punk music, rock critic Greil Marcus writes, "The Sex Pistols made a breach in the pop milieu, in the screen of received cultural assumptions governing what one expected to hear and how one expected to respond." Decades later, the same DIY cultural sensibility would resurface in a video game called DOOM. As the game that introduced the world to the art of the mod, DOOM's infiltration of popular culture has reinvented the way we play. From the streets of Liberty City to the suburban living rooms of the Sims, players are remaking game systems in their own image. Street Mods will explore and celebrate games and game mods with an eye to urban identity, social resistance, and cultural play. 
In the early 1980's, arcade games ushered in a whole new way to think about gaming, technology, and the social connection between the two. Yet over the course of the last 20 years, many of these works of art have been lost to destruction, decay, or simply forgotten altogether. Today, through the use of a technology called emulation, "Arcade Console" brings this archive of classic games back to life. 
Using a custom-built arcade cabinet created by Gus the Country Carpenter, "Arcade Console" mimics the look, feel and experience of a real arcade machine and includes virtually every arcade game ever created. It's a look back at the history and nostalgia of arcade gaming for those who remember it, and those who never had a chance to.
I tracked this by taking periodic casts of her torso and scanning these into a three-dimensional computer modeling program in order to study both the surface growth and the volumetric changes as they occurred. I took frontal and profile photos of my wife twice a week to create a flip-book as a witness to this miraculous inflation. After my daughter was born I used the same program and a digital 3D pointer, along with thousands of photos to track her maturation, as a way of staying sane and imaginative during three months of gut-wrenching colic. This digital documentation led to several pieces, two included here: 39 weeks, which is derived from a mold of the pregnant belly one week before delivery,and a conversation between life and death, which is based on the shape created while lifting my motion-soothed daughter above my head and the stairs we climbed on those endless early nights. 
Laurence Bricker -- Co-founder / Creative Director of Popular Front Interactive.
Paul Frett - Manager, New Business Development Planning & Strategy for Target.com and Founder of Perspective Soup.
