Interactive Media Group

From 1995 to 1997, the IMG workshop at Stanford University was engaged in a critical study of interaction and media, of how we compose and inhabit media. Our approaches drew from art, performance, fiction, music, design, literary theory, philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, computer science, and other disciplines relevant to our participants' interests. Broadly, the aim was to pursue ontological and phenomenological approaches to media, examining artifacts of technology, such as software, languages, design standards and metaphors.

In Fall 1996, we examined a set of technological artifacts, coupled with some readings that participants introduced together. In the winter, we studied the technologies of writing -- studying for example, continuous structures as conceptual and material alternatives to the discrete models of media and performance artifacts. In Spring 1997, we experimented with different ways to map or speak of economy and value in media spaces.

Fall 1997
• Wednesdays, 5-7 pm. Topics: A new seminar on writing as performance.   And preparing for:  experiments on conversational dynamics; seminars in letter writing; talks on multimedia, modernism and dada.
• We started a new thread on conversational dynamics, with which we would like to experiment in the Fall.
  

  June/August

• We continue our maps-transformations discussion and pursuing the summer construction project(s).

  May

• 5/26 Brian Rotman came to talk about new media forums for the materiality crowd.
• 5/19 Niklas Damiris presented Internet: The New Agora, a joint paper with Helga Wild.
• 5/5 & 5/12 we continued our first foray into relativistic or nonlinear maps and transformations, perhaps via topology.

Our meetings in the Fall will be on Wednesdays 5-7 pm. The next few meetings will be in Sweet Hall 403.