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HYBRIDITY
In the last two decades digital and information technologies have ushered in an unprecedented proliferation of new hybrid practices, media forms, discourses, as well as multiple ways for people to connect, collaborate, and interact remotely. The numerous terms used to describe this explosive moment--intermedia, multimedia, integrated media, transvergence, hybridity, hypermedia, convergence--attest not only to the immense energy surrounding these endeavors, but also to the confusion and ambiguity they bring about within academic and cultural institutions, industry, funding organizations, and everyday attempts to categorize, archive and curate across this slipperiness. We summarize some of these tensions below:
- What counts as "art" and the role of the artist/technologist/scientist continues to be highly contested. New generations of artists who understand computer programming are beginning to make significant work, as are artistically minded engineers and computer scientists. Artists are writing, writers are producing art projects, software artists are organizing conferences, media theorists are producing artwork, and artists are running magazines (Scholz).
- The boundaries between producing and consuming continue to shift (think about machinima, e.g., an emerging cinematic form produced mostly by amateurs who rework materials from already existing video games and multiuser environments into short films).
- How a work is distributed and by whom continues to challenge established hierarchies and broadcasting monopolies (think about Napster and other peer-to-peer distributed channels, file-sharing).
- The formats available for artists to distribute and reach a variety of publics are multiplying and combining feverishly-iPods, blogs, mashups, physical installations, cell phones, PDAs, game consoles, videoblogs, DVDs, networked multiuser environments, etc. The same content can be reshaped for different scales, levels of participation, and engagement.
Everywhere within the cosmopolitan centers of the developed and developing world artists, scientists, and technologists are collaborating in complex ways, and producing work within and across forms. London's artist collective Blast Theory conjoins the dramaturgies of outdoor environmental theater and site specific performance with the information technologies of the World Wide Web, PDAs, cell phones, and email. The Ghent/Quebec collective Workspace Unlimited explores architecture's concerns with the built environment, place, and sociability inside of a networked 3D space constructed with software code recycled from the Quake III computer game engine. New York City's OpenEnded Group coordinates real-time motion tracking, dancers, autonomous agents, and computer graphics to create alternative performance procedures and machine-human collaborations for the stage, airport terminal, and plaza. And Mexican/Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer produces large-scale outdoor interactive interventions using robotics, tracking systems, online interfaces, and high-power projectors to explore the intersection between new technologies, public space and performance art.
These hybrid practices involve careful processes in which artists incorporate, re-arrange, and re-fashion older techniques, aesthetic strategies, and cultural forms into both new alliances and disjunctions. They involve new production and distribution models, which are partially automated, dynamic, and open, sometimes enabling artists to bypass traditional gatekeepers, hierarchical star systems, and the legitimizing powers of older cultural institutions. As the wider public gains access to faster network and computer processing speeds, along with mobile wireless devices, individuals are increasingly producing and experiencing these works in real time, simultaneously across different locations and time zones. They are often multi-directional, enabling numerous participants to effect the work and its outcomes. And most importantly, they entail moving the computer out of the house and office and into the physically mobile world, where they become increasingly part of our everyday lives.
Participants in the Hybridity session will:
- Consider and discuss new forms of art being produced within the increasingly hybrid environment of digital and physical space, and in response to the multiplication of delivery systems and formats. How are we consuming art differently and integrating it into our lives in new ways?
- Discuss whether or not, and under what conditions, these hybrid contexts are effecting how you produce, with whom you collaborate, and with what results.
- Talk about the kinds of experiments you are undertaking within the now established field of video gaming and multiuser virtual environments. How are you opening up alternate possibilities for the medium? With fellow filmmakers, choreographers, architects, installation artists, and journalists, discuss the various strategies for encountering, revising, expanding, and altering video game conventions. To what ends and to which publics?
- Evaluate the effectiveness of these hybrids.
- Visit online virtual worlds together and share work, so we can play with these ideas and generate discussion from actual examples. We don't want to distance ourselves from these subjects.
- Propose new projects.
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