Through an ever-burgeoning technical apparatus of surveying, data mining and internet search-tailoring the attention of individual minds is estimated, costed, marketed, bought and sold. The "attention economy" is enabled by technologies like Google’s web-crawler and search algorithms and agents and all kinds of metadata production. The dominance of this mode of conceiving and calculating attention, above all that of the young, can be seen to be bearing fruit in many national, regional and global phenomena. The traditional values of the public sphere are unmistakably reshaped though these processes.
"Paying Attention" is also interested in how practices such as videogaming, P2P Filesharing, pervasive media experimentation, and mobile phone activism create detours, reinventions and reimaginings of the cultural program to which younger generations are recruited. While there is a concerted effort to commercialise and exploit these spaces according to the demands of the global media industries, web 2.0’s reorientation of social communication practices remains charged with an indeterminate techno-cultural potential which the conference seeks to explore.
Applications are invited for research paper contributions on any subject relevant to the conference’s aims. These may include the areas listed below to indicate the broad scope of relevant topics or subjects. The conference also seeks through its poster section contributions of an experimental kind from digital media artists and developers that engage with the conference theme of attention and experiential design in critical and/or creative ways. These may take the form of demos, animatics, ethical or critical design projects, installation treatments or concepts in progress. These will form a major part of the program as key elements in the articulation of viable technocultural futures. We will be seeking submissions that can engage and develop the themes of the event through the summer of 2010 through the online community of conference delegates. Practice based researchers should apply under the poster programme using the 400 word abstract to describe their plans for the event.
Key themes will include:
Education, Technique & Responsibility
The Political Economy of Digital Experience
Emerging forms of knowledge and value transmission
Ethical design, trust and security
Experiments with mediated attention and experience
Value in the new social spaces of digital culture
Records, archives and digital memories
Metadata, search algorithms and politics
Entertainment, marketing and attention technologies
Web 2.0 : Playbour and Grammatisation
Profiling Data Mining and Control
Pervasive media and remediated living spaces
Conference format:
lectures by invited high level speakers
short talks by young & early stage researchers
poster sessions, round table and open discussion periods
forward look panel discussion about future developments
Invited speakers will include:
Michel Bauwens, Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives
Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield .org Independent Net Art collective, UK
Jonathan Dovey, University of the West of England, UK
Aphra Kerr, National University of Ireland Maynooth, IE
Simon Poulter, Independent Digital Artist and Curator, UK
Stanza, Independent Digital Artist, UK
Bernard Stiegler, Institut de recherche et d’innovation, Centre Georges Pompidou, FR
Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples, IT
Deadline for application: 1 May 2010
This conference is accessible on-line from http://www.esf.org/conferences/10316