Fun at the PCA

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Well, a quick update on the conference and I’ll write more later. Before attending anything I met up with David Silver who runs the RCCS and we share coffee and what turned out to be my nearest thing to lunch.

David’s even nicer (and much taller 🙂 )in person than online and it was a very pleasant chat out in the sun, in a little park near the Moscone Center. We talked a little about our projects and about the state of research on new media/ICT/Internet and Digital culture–how ever you want to call it. We agreed that work in the US is more fragmented than in Europe, and the lack of much public funding has given it a very different tone. More on that later.

Then I went to the conference where of course I trawled through the book exhibit, went to few panels than planned, drank too much coffee, and met some interesting people. As I said, details to come, but now once more into the breach!

Research news, conferences, etc.

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So let’s see; I just got accepted to IFIP WG 9.5 International Working Conference on Virtuality and Society: Massive Virtual Communities, which is the 1st and 2nd of July, 2008 at Leuphana University Lueneburg, Germany. I’m glad of that; I hear the group and the people involved are well regarded and there is a book planned, so that may guarantee me another chapter by the time my tenure review rolls around. I guess the nearest big city is Hamburg–I’ve never been anywhere in Germany yet, so actually anywhere will be interesting! I think it’s within reach, by train, of Rotterdam, so I can fit it into my other research pretty easily.

This summer I plan to interview Florian, Mirko, Brenno; some museum folk, and see if I can volunteer at Worm, make a site visit to U. Utrecht, U. Twente, and follow up on the email interviews I’m conducting already. –Of course I talk about new media and tech stuff with Florian, Mirko and Brenno anyway, but I need to do formal interviews to make sure that I get some comparable answers among all of them. Oh yeah, I also want to talk to the women at Gender Changers.

And, if my panel proposals get since at least one panel proposal has been accepted to IR 9.0, I need to work on that some. And there’s the SFRA Europe plan…..oy veh. Overbooked again.

Katynka Martinez

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Katynka Martinez
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Katynka gave a really interesting talk about a project in which high school students made their own versions of the Pac Man game that reflected their own neighborhoods and experience. One was called El Imigrante in which Carlos Jesus Imigrante is pursued around town by minutemen. If they catch him he’s deported, if he wins he gets a green card.

In another game, neighborhood kids collect up loose change while being pursued by neighborhood drunks. If they collect enough, they can buy a toy, but if the bums get the change, they can go to the liquor store for beer.

I wish we’d had more time to talk about interpretations of the different games, and also how they engaged with games like the recent (and really racist) Border Patrol game. But it was a cools talk and it really resonated with what we know about the lives of our own students.

Also, that Border Patrol game is creepily similar to a game popular in Switzerland that Mirko reported recently. In that game, the object is to get rid of the black sheep–but the Border Patrol game is really much worse because (like in the Ethnic Cleansing game) you win by blowing away Mexicans, including women and children, and seeing the blood splatter. Sometimes I’m repelled that creativity and hatred seem not to be mutually exclusive which somehow I feel they should be. Not that this would make sense, but somehow just I think it’s the way things should work.

Mikhail Alexseev speaking on "Russia: Challenges to the Post-Imperial Migration State"

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Finally things seem to have settled into some kind of groove. We have had dinner, we have had drinks, and now our first plenary has begun. I’ve had some time to speak with Mikhail over dinner–very pleasant fellow, and very sharp on these issues.

Some highlights– that as the Russian empire expanded, it’s diversity expanded as well, because the empire absorbed many non-Russian groups. At the time, it was not perceived as threatening because power increased with that expansion. But now, Russia is very diverse, and the empire is no longer so powerful. Finally, right now Russian birth and death rates are such that even in the best case, the need to attract and absorb about 35,000,000 immigrants to maintain the existing population levels of about 140,000,000.

Ok, that wasn’t final–also, the ratio of ethnic Russians to other ethnicities inside Russia is shrinking already. Migrants are now coming from former Soviet Republics, and Russia has to deal with the spread of Islam and territorial vulnerability. And, most people when surveyed, would overwhelmingly prefer that the migrant populations were reduced.

Pictorial ethnic cleansing–kids, here is is the house of a Cossack; find the alien objects in the house and cross them out. This is a contemporary textbook aimed ad elementary school kids. (Cossacks were border guards, not quite, but almost vigilantes).

So the current context leads to quite serious tensions between ethnic Russians and other populations inside Russia, and Putin has made it very difficult for any immigrants to enter Russia, other than those from former Soviet Republics. Further, extremely high levels f latent xenophobia–well over 50% think all immigrants, legal or illegal, and their children, should be deported.

In sum:

  • Post-Soviet Russia changed rapidly from an empire to a global migration state, but institutions have lagged behind.
  • The Russian Imperial legacy, changing demographics, and migration challenge Russian identity and raise the threat of communal violence
  • Short-term restrictionist policies responding to these challenges have deep roots in the imperial identity and legacy, but they undermine Russia’s current and future status as a great power.

Great talk!

And a settled panel schedule becomes a moving target

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Ok, I know people have personal situations that come up, but this week we have received cancellations from about five people who just last week were saying how much they looked forward to meeting us. Grrr. But it’s ok, we juggled everything, the show has gone on. But now we are having issues over the alcohol and I really don’t see how we can have dinner without drinks…I mean come on, we are all grown ups, we’ve traveled far, worked hard to present good papers. Anyway, I will not be sad to shed the hat of conference co-chair.

And because I’ve been running round like a maniac trying, along with Betsy, the other chair, to settle this stuff, I’ve hardly had a chance to hear any of the talks. So that’s a bit disappointing, though I have at least gotten to meet and chat with many of our speakers. The worst aspect is the finances–the school just doesn’t have much funding to support this kind of thing; they want us to raise our profile, but that costs money!

So yeah, lots of fun…

Whoohoo, the Empire Conference has started

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I am glad to have had this experience, but I am so glad that in two days, it will be over! Tonight we held the opening reception, for which we slightly overestimated food and drink, but the reverse would have been worse by far.

So we have nice collection of papers and two really kick-ass keynote speakers, Mikhail Alexseev and Katynka Martinez. I’m really looking forward to meeting them both and to hearing some of the other talks as well. I also finally met Anne Paulet in person; she teaches history up at Humboldt State U. (also a branch of the CSU, for you out of town readers). She and I have corresponded quite a bit over the last months and I was getting ready for the conference, and we have hit it off very well.

Other news–I ended up sticking with a MacBook Pro, much as I admire the MB Air. the latter just gives up too many things I really need, so I will deal with lugging a 6-pounder for awhile.

More later…

I am so behind…

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Even though I’m not teaching as much this term, I am just buried in work. I’m co-chair a conference that takes place in two weeks and will so glad when it’s over. What a headache. Plus I am trying to work on some grant proposals, sent in the two IR 9.0 proposals, and just sent off a chapter proposal. Whew. On the up side, if the conference and chapter proposals are accepted, I will have a lull on those fronts until summer at least.

Speaking of summer, I will be headed to the Netherlands again for more interviews. I’ve been doing some via email, but I also need to go on site to visit some of the new media programs/centers. I may also give some talks, but that’s up in the air right now. Whatever else happens, I will see all my Rotterdam friends again, and finally (I hope) meet Brenno de Winter in person, plus a new acquaintance, Elfi Ettinger. Elfi is on one of the panels I put together and teaches at the University of Twente.

In spite of being so busy, I spent most of the day in a workshop about writing successful grants, except for the last two hours in which I heard Clark Buckner speak about “Autonomy, Plurality, and Play in Contemporary Art.” It was a good talk, and the workshop was informative, but I’m just exhausted now. More later.

Research Update

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Let’s see…first the bad news: didn’t get the Franklin Grant. It’s really competitive and I know I did the best proposal I could, so while I wish I’d gotten it, I don’t feel so bad. I talked with some colleagues and the consensus seems to be that getting grants is really almost impossible until after you’ve published a book. I wonder if that’s really true.

Of course the grant was intended to support a book project, so now the question is how to publish a book faster without having to to travel as much. I actually have good ideas about that. One is that I am already collecting a lot of great interviews via email with some of the women I’ve met in the Netherlands, and I’m getting so much that I think I could do a book just about their experiences, which would be cool. The other, easiest (I hope) approach is an edited volume. I’m proposing two panels for the next meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), which is Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place. That conference will be held in Copenhagen next fall. So I already have 6 proposals that look really strong and I know of at least a few other people who might be interested in submitting papers/chapters. So I hope I can interest a publisher in that idea in the next few months.

If I can get one of these accepted, I could get one or both finished by next August and then have a much better shot at grants. Plus, I could then come up for promotion to full professor early. Maybe in just 3 or 4 years, instead of the usual five. And of course I’d still be working on my original book idea, which I could probably complete in about 2-3 years, depending on when I can get time and funding for the longer trips to the NL.

More on the trip

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After my talk at De Geuzen, I wandered around downtown a bit and then had dinner with Florian at a cheap but good Roti place near Piet Zwart’s new location in the Kareldormanhoff. We are still trying to think about how to do a joint MA, but it’s proving much tougher than I originally expected. I think we (the CSUStan group) will have to get our MA going, and maybe first try some simple exchanges for course credit. Also, the the CSU is under threat of major budget cuts, and so any new projects will be harder if we are all tightening our belts.

I was still really jet-lagged, so after dinner I went back to the flat and tried to answer email or read, or something, but while I had trouble sleeping I also couldn’t think very well. So annoying. I should have drunk more at dinner. 😉

Wednesday I had another interview scheduled with Hajo Doorn, director at Worm, and thanks to my jet-lag I woke up barely in time to dress and race over there. This time we talked less about Worm itself and more about how Hajo sees the Dutch new media scene and his own role in it. I was impressed at how ambivalent he felt. I say impressed because Worm seems to be doing very well and Hajo himself has gained some influence, including serving on some kind of committee or board that awards grant money for projects. I’m not sure how many people in this position would question what it meant, whether it was right, so I am impressed that Hajo does.

He made several striking comments in this vein. First, and this seems to be a shift since last summer, he thinks Worm is in a way forced to be too big now that they are successful and receive funding themselves. They have to employ a lot of people in order to comply with the requirement of receiving funding, and maybe its good that all these people have jobs, but a lot of money is now not spent directly on projects. Also, he’s not even sure that their projects are always the most deserving or successful–that goes back to our earlier discussion of how success is measured. Also, based on his comments on certain other groups, I think Hajo worries that he will become disconnected from real innovative work, because he’s so wrapped up in administrivia. Finally, he’s not sure the project he is involved in evaluating are always so great, but who knows, maybe that’s not so important either, maybe the experiment is worthwhile. I haven’t met anyone else willing to be this forthright and I admire that like hell, because of course it’s a risk, both personally and professionally.

We also talked about what kinds of work is most interesting right now, and what is overrated. Hajo is completely fed up with what passes for interactivity, and I agree with his critique. He gave the example of an art piece in which people step onto a platform with sensors that measure their feet and if their feet are one size, a light this color glows, and if they are that size, a different color light appears. So what? Unfortunately a lot of interactive pieces do seem to remain at this really basic level and so they very quickly become really boring. I further agree that for real, interesting interaction we would probably do better with artificial intelligence.

When I think about, for example, the web sites that are interesting, they are those that facilitate interaction with others–whether we speak of something like FaceBook, World of Warcraft, old-school MOOs, or what have you. And compare this to static texts like novels, paintings, movies. Though these don’t change, they represent (I think) a density of the creator’s/s’ thoughts that readers or viewers can interact with over time. So, interactive new media, to succeed, has to either connect us to other people, or in someway recreate the experience of a conversation with another intelligence.

I’ll have more on the conversation with Hajo later on, but I have to to catch up on other stuff–I am so behind on my entries!