I am thrilled to be attending the Impacto Social del Diseño (Design’s Social Impact) conference in Mexico City this week.  I’ll be giving a presentation about a recent paper I wrote that focuses on a redefinition of design as experienced in the work we have been doing in Guatemala.

There’s a great line-up of presenters, and I’m looking forward to the talks as well as the after-talks networking!

I’m thrilled to be traveling to Sao Paulo to present my paper “Layered Photography: A Case for Still Images as “Time-based” Media” at the 2009 Electronic Language International Festival.  Below is the abstract for this paper – the first I have written that presents an argument explored through three of my artworks – my works in light boxes, Pompidou from Above, 6 Seconds, and outsideIn.  Please contact me if you would like to read the full paper – I’ll be happy to share it!

Abstract

Analyses on film and photography often characterize the photograph as a still image and film as a sequence of images (Campany 2007). Writings on “media arts” tend to focus on artwork often referred to as “time-based”, such as video, performance, installation, software art, net art, and combinations of these. The focus on photography as a medium centered on pausing time has removed it from the field of “media arts”, both in terms of its general practice and theoretical analysis.

As a practice-based researcher and digital artist I challenge this notion, engaging with photography as a time-based medium and creating work that I believe should be situated more in the realm of media arts than the more traditional label of photography. I use the production of my artworks as an opportunity to challenge and redefine existing media with an ongoing interest in space and time – how each can be captured, represented, and redefined. In this paper I specifically discuss the principal techniques I incorporate into my photography-based work, such as pairing and layering (digitally and physically), pushing it far away from the realm of the “still image”.

This paper presents a variety of theories around photography, still images, and cinema to argue that much of what is done in digital photography today relates less to the classic definitions of that medium and more to our understanding of media arts. The work of contemporary artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bill Viola, Jeff Wall and David Hockney offer a framework for three of my own artworks which, through physical and digital layering and pairing, exist more as time-based media that incorporate photography as a vehicle for the production of images, and less as “time-fossils” (Orlow 1999).

Tomorrow I will be presenting my paper “The New School, CARE & Ajkem’a Loy’a: A case study in learning in intensive and immersive global programs and in cross-cultural and bilingual collaborative work” at the GLIDE ‘08 (Global Interaction in Design Education) conference.  However, I will not travel further than my desk and I will not see any faces other than their bio headshots on a wiki.

I will have actively participated in an academic conference, delivering a 30-minute presentation about my paper that was double peer-reviewed, and all of this, without increasing my carbon footprint.  That is precisely the premise of GLIDE ‘08 – how can we create more sustainable academic exchanges?

This conference won’t have such advanced technologies as others propose but I am certainly looking forward to the experiment.  All participants logged into an Adobe Connect conferenc room and phoned into a conference call, with all watching PowerPoint slides change as the presenter delivers the paper.

The biggest loss – the chance encounters that happen at the coffee and cookie table during the break!