Over at the Irish Arts Council, they came over all
new media recently, yet I'm sure some traditional Irish phds could prescribe a suitable course of treatment to remedy that situation.
In the interests of freedom, information and national progress, they have even gone to the trouble of putting up several files offering audio etc from the the various strands and break-out sessions from the day.
I really must say, having listened to and viewed pretty much all of the material, in part hope of some free education maybe, I learned little if anything new, also, with the exception of some comments from the artist
Conor McGarrigle the majority of the information and opinion struck me as both dated and somewhat skewed, any central idea that there is only two major perspectives on 21st century creativity and that new media is merely the web or web + mobile, or webtv & podcasting and blogs, just ridicules the whole point of bringing so many people together for a 'new media and the arts' discussion in the first instance. But this is a state sponsored body remember, so you can really only expect state sponsored thinking.
I got peeved with Keen's condescendingly curt dismissal of the collaborative novel project 1 million penguins - and his overall myopic pigeon holery in general. While good ole gooner charlie leadbetter did 'pitch in' on the merits of potentially new paradigms, and despite the presence of the ever popular John Kelly, the whole thing still managed to come across as a private champagne party in some poor unfortunates' desert. Thanks god we'll be back to proper civilization soon eh charlie...back behind our own familar gates.
New media is exactly that, it's media that is new, as opposed to old and we all know what old media is.. the fundamental difference between old media and new media is quite simply: access.
So it was illuminating to see so many representatives of the gate keeping fraternity on the role call prepared to discuss all aspects of it.
What with the draconian IP laws in ireland and the EU, It's like potential criminals visiting a prison officers convention to learn about freedoms of expression. We had RTE, Microsoft, the education sector in various guises and then a few self interested self promoters there to snag a bit of business and tell us what the best (them centric!) methods were. Which again is entirely counter-productive to the spirit of new media.
Oh I could rant for hours about this sort of cultural hegemony... but I won't.
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