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ONLINE SYMPOSIUM
From March 15-26 2006 Workspace Unlimited presents Breaking the Game Symposium, a first-iteration online event that brings together competing theorists and practitioners to debate and reflect on virtual worlds, computer gaming, immersive technologies, and new possibilities for artistic practice and experience. The symposium will open up the art of game modification to the contingencies of everyday life, where interactive technologies increasingly mediate physical spaces and human movements in very complex and dynamic ways. The symposium themes are: , and .
Participants will consider gaming and other virtual technologies in relationship to building and designing cities, navigating and experiencing urban life, constructing identities, and creating and maintaining social interaction. The symposium encourages debate and discussion through multiple formats including text, video interviews, phone blogging, images, animation, and virtual walkthroughs.
We want the symposium to function as a workspace for testing out ideas, developing new tools, sharing creative processes and works in progress. Breaking the Game is a prototype for how we'd like to initiate and develop real projects around a specific focus, connect our own working process to the ideas and practice of others, and create networks that facilitate and feed into further collaborative opportunities.
How do I participate?
Fill out the symposium and let us know which themes you can participate in. Along with your registration please propose a framework, a perspective, or an artist statement that articulates your interest in either of the areas. This should be no longer than 30 lines. The Workspace Unlimited team will choose participants based on these materials, the variety of points-of-view they offer, and the degree to which they question or resonate with the symposium themes.
What is the symposium format?
Breaking the Game symposium will be situated on a website built specifically for this event. This website will be available in March 2006. The symposium moderator will contact select participants for an exploratory interview about your submission and the ideas contained within. These interviews will be recorded using iChat, Skype, or other video conferencing and communication software, and posted to the website. We will then ask you to submit a position paper, or a series of ideas, a manifesto, video, animation, sound piece, work in progress, recorded performance, a demo, or a virtual walkthrough. Each interview and media submission will form the basis for the symposium's ongoing debates. We will alert participants to new postings as we receive them. Further responses to one another can be in the form of text or other media.
What do we expect from participants?
The symposium's success depends upon participants' commitment to ongoing interaction during the course of the event, responding to one another in a timely way, and actively uploading media in response to one another (texts, video, sound, demos, etc.). You must agree to being interviewed, and we will set up a convenient time far enough in advance. Periodically we will ask you to view specific clusters of media on the website and ask you to respond.
What will happen with the results of the symposium?
All of the symposium's text dialogues, recorded video chats, phone interviews, and other media will eventually be ported to a 3D navigable space. Breaking the Game asks: How might the symposium itself become re-mediated as a 3D networked virtual world? How can we play with, think about, and continue to debate the workshops' themes inside this space, using the language, tools, protocols, software, and interactive possibilities of gaming culture and technology?
The results will be accessible through the Virtual World of Art network after May 2006. The public will be able to navigate the results of the symposium on computers from three physical nodes: the Vooruit, Ghent's performing arts complex, Rotterdam's V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, and Montreal's Society for Art and Technology.
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