Saturday, Sunday
Arrival of the participants

2 - 3.45 p.m.
Century of Film - the moving image; from kinetoskope to the Internet.
Screenings of films and videos from history and presence of moving image.
In collaboration with the National Film Archive and Krátký Film Praha


4 - 5 p.m.
Machine Centred Humanz
Multimedia performance
Guy van Belle (Holland) and Gert Aerdse (Belgium)
Roving Walter Walter
Presentation of the most recent technologies in the field of digital sound and image

7.p.m.
Dinner at the restaurant Letenský zámeček, Restuarant Ullman in front of the building of the National Technical Museum

9.30 a.m. - 10.30 p.m
OPENING STATEMENTS:
Michael de la Fontaine - Goethe-Institut Prag
Jaroslav Andel - Independent Scholar
Jan Evangelista Purkinje and the Dawning of Neuroscience, Media Technology and Modern Art.
Jan Evangelista Purkinje, whose work provides a framework for the conference, appears in the hindsight of almost two hundred years as perhaps the central figure in the intersection of the emergent fields of neuroscience, media technology and modern art. He studied perception and described a number of phenomena that became later key concepts and topics for the development of neuroscience. By focusing on the so-called subjective and virtual phenomena, he also paved the way for the invention of cinema and later generations of media. He also predicted the rise and flowering of abstract art, and even described such particular aesthetic concerns as those associated with kinetic art and op art. He can be considered a precursor of dromology, a discipline that studies speed and the perception of movement. His ideas and experiments represent one of the earliest explorations of six topical themes of this conference: the relationship between visual perception and optical instruments; speed and the perception of movement; the interplay among different senses in relation to our notion of reality; the looping effects of scientific discoveries and technological inventions; the exchange between art, science, and technology; and the vision of media technology.

Jiří Hoskovec - Charles University, Prague
Observations, Experiments, Discoveries
Purkynje, a polymath of the Czech/Austrian/German scientific community in the 19th century whose work is associated with the dawn of neuroscience, made a number of influential discoveries, but none of them as interesting as his earliest enquiries into vision. Prof. Jiři Hoskovec collaborated on the recently published book Purkinje_s Vision: The Dawning of Neuroscience by Nicholas J.Wade and Josef Brožek.
20.min

[ break ]

11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
SESSION 1.
Moving Pictures and Optical Devices: Technology, Science, Entertainment and Art
Among many developments leading to the emergence of cinema and moving pictures in the 19th century, the tradition of optical instruments associated with painting, optics, magic, and natural history is the most spectacular: Magic Lanterns, Phenakistoscopes, Zoetropes, Praxinoscopes, Zoopraxinoscopes, Cinematographe, Mutoscope, etc.

Barbara Stafford - University of Chicago
INTENSIFIED REALITY: Visual Devices and the Remaking of Worlds
Barbara Maria Stafford, professor, department of art history, University of Chicago and co-curator of the "Devices of Wonder" exhibition, explores the visual history of instrumentalized perception and its links with magic and illusion, transformation and alternative realms. By examining optical devices from the pre-modern to the contemporary period, she traces the continuities and slippages between earlier and emergent media.
30.min
lecture (audio)


Erkki Huhtamo - Media researcher, Associate Professor, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Dept. of Design|Media Arts
The Avantgarde goes to (Pre-)cinema: remarks about the role of optical devices in early 20th century avantgarde art.
Avantgarde artists of the early 20th century repeatedly referred in their works to devices now often known as "pre-cinematic". Max Ernst recycled the zoetrope and Marey's "Station physiologique" in his collages. Oscar Fischinger made abstract animations for the Mutoscope. Coloured light projections were associated with the magic lantern show, and particularly one of its highlights, the Chromatrope. Marcel Duchamp not only engaged in a dialogue with Marey's version of chronophotography, but re-invented himself as a "precision oculist", re-enacting the trajectory of the physiological optics in the 19th century. Significantly, he finished his career by re-inventing the peepshow with Etant donnés (1945-1966). References to "pre-cinema" were not just passive reflections, but led to active experimentation with technology, anticipating media art. The relationship between avantgarde art and pre-cinematic technology has so far gone largely unscrutinized. This lecture provides a starting point for a critical re-assessment of this relationship.
30.min
lecture (audio)


Werner Nekes - Filmmaker, Collector/Mülheim
"The ambiguity of perception. What do we see and what do we believe to have seen. Images and the Mind of Man."
30.min

[ lunch break ]

2:00-4:00 p.m.
SESSION 2.
Kinetic and Cinematic: From Mobility to Telematic Bodies
Cinema and the consequent generations of new media can be viewed both as products and symbolic systems of mobility, one of the principal characteristics of modernity. The study of the perception of moving bodies laid the foundations for the development of new media. This further fostered the fascination with dynamics, fluidity, and the transitory that have inspired a great number of modern scientific and artistic concepts. This link thus provides a historical context for understanding the multiple interchange between new media and new fields of explorations.

Prof. Tom Gunning - Art History Department and the College, New York
"Mobile Bodies in the Realm of the Senses: The Experiments of Symbolism and Chronophotography."
At the turn of the century both artists and scientists converged on anew exploration of the human body and its senses. This involved new technological modes of recording and representation, many of them exploring the previously unexamined aspects of sight and hearing and its technological recording and analysis. I want to explore the way Symbolist poets like Rimbaud and Charles Cros and painters such as Burne-Jones, Fernand Khnopff and Kupka both drew on new scientific technologies and even contributed to them in their attempt to create a modern art of the senses. The intersection between this artistic experimentation and the scientific experimentation on the body in motion by such photographer researchers as Muybridge, Mary, Albert Londe, and Demeny would form the centre of my talk.
30.min
lecture (audio)


Erik Davis - Writer, Researcher, San Francisco
[ http://www.levity.com/figment/bio.html ]
"Astral Avatars: Tracing the Electronic-Etheric Body"
In order to investigate the linements and characteristics of virtual bodies – at once the digital masks known as avatars and the fantasies and sensibilities that energize and animate these simulacra -- this paper will explore the emergence of the "etheric" and "astral" body in late nineteenth century theosophy and occultism. Not only do these notions continue to influence popular images and conceptions of the non-corporeal or virtual body, consciously or otherwise, but they have always been bound up with a particular technocultural transformation: the redeployment of electricity and electro-magnetism as communication media. The subsequent need to translate the body into this new realm of signals and vibrations can help account not only for contemporary fantasies of virtual bodies, but also relate the issue of virtuality to the vast and complex "alternative" tradition of electrical and electromagnetic healing.
30.min
lecture (audio)


Wolfgang Bock - University Weimar,
What is new in the New Media?
Theological and sociological implications of the new media focussing especially on the element of "new" in it. What is actually new and how is it related to the older ideas of utopia? Which part of the reality does not appear in the media?
20.min

discussion:
Ivan M. Havel - Institute for Theoretical Studies, UK Prague,
Jiří Fiala - Matematic Faculty, UK Prague

[ Break ]

4:30-6:30 p.m.
SESSION 3.
Exploring Senses, Reinventing Media
The notion of visual culture has recently been hailed as a fresh approach to reality that contests the dominance of text-oriented thinking in favour of the visual. Purkinje_s ideas and experiments suggests that the dichotomy of the visual and the discursive can be surpassed by exploring how different senses contribute to the constitution of reality and how they relate to each other. His work can serve as an inspiration for a deeper understanding of issues of inter-mediality and trans-mediality - studies of the relationships nd interchange between different media as well as senses in relation to the constant effort to negotiate our concepts of reality.

Roy Ascott - Artist and Theorist, CAiiA Institute, UK
[ http://www.caiia-star.net/ ]
PLANETARY TECHNOETICS: art, technology and consciousness.
Starting from the implications of the 9-11 massacre, I would like to look at the question of planetary consciousness, in the context of art practice, with its emergent moistmedia, and the constructive function of mixed reality technologies in both western and non-western cultures. In thepresent crisis of contesting ideas of reality, only new, creative metaphors can be expected to bridge the ideological divide. The artist is metaphor builder par excellence. A cultural shift has taken place which returns us in an important sense to much older world views, while enabling us to create structures and behaviours fitting the 21st century. The dematerialisation of art in the 20th century becomes a re-materialisation in our era, with the advent of nanotechnology and moist media. Our focus is on Art, technology and consciousness, from which a technoetic planetary culture could emerge, based on the Three VRs : Validated Reality: involving reactive, mechanical technology in a prosaic, Newtonian world; Virtual Reality: involving interactive, digital technology in a telematic, immersive world; Vegetal Reality:involving psychoactive plant technology in an entheogenic, spiritual world. To this end, collaborative and transdisciplinary research is needed for which entirely new organisms of learning and production must be engendered. In our search of an interactive paradigm, CAiiA-STAR and the Planetary Collegium are an initial response to this need.
30.min

Guy van Belle - Artist, researcher, educator Antwerpen/Rotterdam
Gert Aerdse - media artist, Brussel
[ http://www.mXHz.org ]
[ http://www.ipem.rug.ac.be ]
[ http://www.no-sinc.org ]
[ http://www.hisk.edu ]
[ http://www.keyworx.com ]
[ http://www.waag.org ]
Machine Centered Humanz
It is clear that we have to pick up where science and art once were divided. We have to rethink our current state of the arts, and revamp the old sciences of audio and visual perception. After the commercial take over leading to similar consumer products, it is time to shift the research program from these frozen foundations, add a cognitive science angle, define "from analysis to synthesis", and do research into new audiovisual analysis and synthesis techniques: there are many to be discovered yet! Paul Demarinis' dictum "music is sound to the ears" can easily be extended in an audiovisual common context. An additional set of interest programs are to be developed to investigate expressivity and performativity. Together with participation and interaction, these cognitive activities are basic constituents of any cultural activity, and we need to crack the code behind this through further research, experiment and development, and establish a more exact view on the relatedness to human behavior. Technological art tends to be cultural, dynamic, non-linear, multidirective, timeless and chaotic, aesthetic and most of all: autonomous!
30.min

Discussion
30.min

9:30-11:00 a.m
SESSION 4.
Media Inventors: Redefining the Boundaries between Science, Technology, and Art and Transformations of Media.
Media inventors have often crossed the boundaries between individual fields while redefining their relationships. The scientist Purkinje was a prolific translator of poetic works and bridged the gap between science and art by executing his scientific experiments on himself. The painters Daguerre and Morse invented media that accelerated the growth of scientific knowledge and the poet Charles Cross used scientific systems for groundbreaking inventionsof colour photography and sound recording as well as for a visionary method of communication with extraterrestrial civilizations. The scrutiny of charakters of inventors suggest how development of each new medium is interlinked with the previous media and in the same time did transform fields of its influence.

Dieter Daniels - Art Historian, MediaTheorist /Leipzig
Media as continuation of art by other means, S. F. B. Morse and J. L. M. Daguerre 1839
Telegraphy and photography are the starting points for everything called today "new media" - ranging from TV to the internet. S. F. B. Morse and J. L. M. Daguerre where artists, which stoped painting and became famous as inventors of telegraphy and photography. What does that mean for the common ground of art and media in todays perspective?
30.min
lecture (audio)

Prof. Richard Grusin - Theorist, Wayne State University, USA
TELEVISUAL SCREEN SPACE, COLLAGE, AND THE REMEDIATION OF MODERNISM
In Clement Greenberg's influential and highly contested account of modernistpainting, collage played a crucial role in calling attention to the fact that "flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art." Because of this unique condition, Greenberg argues, "Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else."
Where "realistic, illusionist art had dissembled the medium, using art toconceal art," Greenberg writes, modernist art in its later stages "abandoned in priciple. . . the representation of the kind of space that recognizable, three-dimensional objects can inhabit." As critics of film know all too well, flatness is also a condition of that medium. Indeed in The World Viewed Stanley Cavell has sketched out a number of important affiliations between his own account of the uniqueness of film as a medium and Greenberg's account of modernism. But as Cavell also noted, another condition of film is precisely its representation of the kind of space that recognizable, three-dimensional objects can inhabit. Like painting and film, television, too, shares the condition of flatness and two-dimensionality; and like realistic painting and film, television traditionally employs its two-dimensionality to represent, or as Cavell persuasively explains, to monitor, the three-dimensional world. In recent years, however, televisual screen space has begun to orient itself to flatness in ways that bear interesting affinities to the employment of collage in modernist painting. As the space of the television screen comes increasingly to resemble the space of the computer screen--both as desktop and as web browser--the two-dimensionality of the televisual medium becomes increasingly not something to be concealed, but rather a condition that the medium seeks to foreground and acknowledge. In the paper I would present at "Excavating the Future," I will explore the way in which televisual screen space serves to remediate modernism through techniques both similar to and strikingly different from the use of collage in modernist painting. Beginning with the video of Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demonstration of the newly invented direct manipulation interface (what has come to be known as the graphical user interface, or GUI), I look at the way in which this invention has helped to redraw the boundaries between science, art, and technology by redefining media not as representations of the kind of space that three-dimensional objects can inhabit but as new quasi-objects or hybrids within the space of our three-dimensional world.
30.min
lecture (audio)

Discussion

11:15 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
SESSION 5.
The Moment of Discovery: From Science to Art and Technology and Vice Versa
Discoveries connect different traditions and fields while opening new developments. This was the case of Purkinje's exploration of eyes' movement which inspired his prediction of the rise of abstract and kinetic art. His studies of the perception of movement led him to contribute to the emerging science and art of moving pictures. Similarly, color theories paved the way for Neoimpressionism and technologies of color photography. In the twentieth century, the invention of the computer was made possible by mathematical theories. How does the notion of "the thinking machine" effect the cross-fertilisation of arts, science and technology?

Miklos Peternak - Art Historian, Mediaartist
[ www.c3.hu ]
The Record of the Gaze. From perspective to "vision in motion" and beyond:Remarks and examples on vision from an artistic point of view: preparator notes to C3 new research/exhibition project.
The history of vision can be reconstructed on the basis of (visual) artistic inventions, examinations and especially the use of new image types. From the diary of Albrecht Dürer to László Moholy-Nagy's book, vision in motion there are a lot of examples where one find artists in search of new kind of views. Image making in its experimental form derives not only from new sensations in the visual field, but also creates new exercises for eye/mind/visual cognition. The experiences during the course of the evolutionary (hi)story of new media tools created new type of interface(s) between history and its human recognition. From Alberti's window-picture definition to the Microsoft windows, the direct link is the need for a non-moving gaze.
30.min
lecture (audio)

Rolf Pixley - MediaArtist, Researcher, Amsterdam
Once and Future Machine(s) - The New Mechanists and their surprising devices.
A unique artifact, the "Homeostat" (circa. 1948), constructed by W. Ross Ashby, was the first machine to embody second-order adaptation and, in some sense, self-organization. Its implications in terms of the actual and metaphorical definition of mechanism are explored. A short tutorial on state spaces and a cybernetic notion of an observer is offered. Various correlates in neurology and anthropology are suggested. Beautiful and amusing examples of other similar devices are shown.
30 min
lecture (audio)

Discussion 45 min

[ Lunchbreak ]

2.00-4.00 p.m
SESSION 6
Media Visions: Beyond the Dialectics of Liberation and Control?
In his article "Kinesiskop," written in 1865, Purkinje envisioned the spectacular advance of the visual associated with the moving image and its applications in science and art. He also introduced the system of fingerprint reading (dactyloscopy), which was soon adopted for personal identification and became one of the first modern methods of control and surveillance. Empowerment and domination, liberation and control are closely intertwined in the rise and evolution of technology and new media. Can we find today a frame of reference that would enable us to look beyond this dialectics?

Christian Huebler - member of Knowbotic Research –Zurich/Koln
[ http://www.krcf.org ]
Reclaiming public domain as sites of constructive conflicts
Public domains are increasingly required to demonstrate their interests in the face of technology, i.e. they have to acquire a presence inside the programs and technological models, If this presence is not achieved, then the public quality will waste away at the user interfaces.Media technologies with all its universalising and standardizing mechanisms undermine the essence of the public domain as a zone of uncontrollability. But the instability of the public domain is the condition of its active potential. Reclaiming public domains as sites of constructive conflict and developing forms of collaborative agency for the new intersections of virtual and physical public environments are therefore imperatives of the current situation. The projects of Knowbotic Research put to the test not the freedom of opinion but the freedom of action within networked environments.
30.min
lecture (audio)

Richard Kriesche – Artist and Theorist, Hochschule fuer Gestaltung, Germany
[ http://www.korso.at/korso/kunst/stmeku.htm ]
"Up until now, we have been confronted with the creation of a machine-based environment outside ourselves. Now we are faced with the info-based environment inside ourselves, with the creation of a self, interfacing our own inner-world with the outer, with the creation of a cybernetic organism. (to quote Donna Haraway: with a cyborg.) This is the search of the eternal 'meta-individual,' which the eremites in the desert of Syria, the monks in Christian monasteries were striving for, it has been the struggle for a one-ness combined with the whole-ness, socially alone, mentally united, technologically omnipresent. This is the fresh new field of dialectic action for a true information-based art."
lecture (audio)

Prof. Siegfried Zielinski - Media archaeologist and Founding
Rector of the Academy of Arts and the Media Cologne
[ http://www.ctheory.com/global/ga111.html ]
Towards an Economy of Friendship
There are two traces/tracks going through the history of the media. One you can call the industrial project in a broad sense. it calls for effectiveness, works with concepts of reduction, acceleration, follows the overwhelming principles of markets and profit. Parallel to that, less seen and more peripheral there is the project of friendship. scientific and artistic work within a network of those, who understand (also each other), who invent to improve the relationships between each other, an economy which is only possible on the base of expenditure, lavishness, profligaton instead of profit. experimentation includes the experiment with oneself. it is the more risky way...
20.min
lecture (audio)

Prof. Ryszard W. Kluszcynski - Arthistorian and Curator, Warszawa
The Myth of Liberation, Illusion of Control Zikmund Bauman and Miroslaw Rogala
20.min
lecture (audio)

4.30-6.00 p.m
Final Panel
New and Old Media in the 21.st Century
Perspectives of humanism, technology, art, science and society.

7.30-9.00 p.m.
Purkynjematographie
(from the National Film Archive Prague)
   Jan Evangelista Purkyne (1986)
   How the film was born? (1926)
   Magic Lantarn (Jiri Lehovec, 1973)
   First films of Jan Krizenecky (1908)
   Dante's Inferno (Italy, 1909)


BIO PONREPO
Bartolomějská 11, Praha 1, tel.: 24237233

10.00 a.m.- 1.30 p.m.
Academy of Visual Arts
U akademie 4, Prague 7
presentation hall
presentations and discussion

7.30 p.m.
Camera Magica (from the archive of Werner Nekes)
BIO PONREPO
Bartolomějská 11, Prague 1, tel.: 24237233


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