Symposium shows off experiments in new media, technology

Juniors Tyler King and Jason Nelson were on their way to Roots Juice Bar on Saturday morning when they stopped dead in their tracks to gawk at the sight before them. Artist Robert Derr donned a suit covered in shiny disks and a neckpiece composed of four cameras. He was walking down Kirkwood Avenue.\n"It's a cool sight on a Saturday morning when I am hungover," King said.\nDerr was a participant in this weekend's new media symposium, Perform.Media, supported by several University departments, including the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, the Jacobs School of Music, the School of Informatics and the Department of Telecommunications. The activities included an exhibition opening in the SoFA gallery that will run until Oct. 14, presentations and lectures, workshops, and a night of musical performances.\nIn the foreword of the program for the weekend, Director Andrew Bucksbarg said: "The Perform.Media festival and symposium frames ideas and experiences with a focus on the performing of media -- the doing, being, activity or embodying of both the producer and user of media."\nDerr came to the gallery opening Friday night in his handmade outfit and invited members of the crowd to roll a dice as part of an interactive contribution to the symposium. He recorded the results of 30 different rolls. Each number corresponded to a different move. Each roll directed him forward for a block, backward for a block, right for a block, left for a minute or a spin for a minute.\nDerr began at the Monroe County Courthouse, and following the cues he received from the previous evening's dice rolling, he walked through downtown for about an hour and eventually ended near Fairview Elementary School. \n"By making myself somewhat of a spectacle, the city is reflected onto me, and I disappear into the landscape," Derr said.\nPeter Haralovich, a Bloomington resident and alumnus of the School of Fine Arts, was returning from a LotusFest volunteer meeting when he spotted Derr crossing an intersection. \n"I think it is a pretty good look," Haralovich said. "It reminds me of (French artist) Marcel Duchamp."\nThe footage shot by Haralorich's four cameras will be edited and played in the SoFA gallery during the exhibition.\nChrista Erikson's work is also displayed in the gallery. She was the first digital media faculty member in the SoFA but is now a tenured professor at Stony Brook University in New York. She said that it was nice to see such progress in the new media field at her homecoming.\nHer piece, "Eternal Climb," is a ladder with a television display connected to a live feed from the stock market. It collects data every 20 minutes. When the stock market rises, the hands shown on the screen turn green and make an upward climbing motion. When the market falls, they turn red and move down at an appropriate speed. Erikson describes her piece as an "apt metaphor for what we all go through financially."\nOther highlights from this weekend were a presentation by Randall Parker, who created his own government agency, the U.S. Department of Art and Technology, and a presentation by Edward Castronova, who has a doctorate in economics and is currently developing a new computer game with a Shakespearean backstory while simultaneously running experiments on the quantity theory of macroeconomics.\nAnother presentation involved a video-chat set up with Isabelle Arvers, an independent new media curator from France who is working through gamer culture to create a new art movement known as "Neen." There was also a workshop on how to create and edit "wikis," like Wikipedia.\nThere were more than 50 participants in the weekend's events. Descriptions of their work can be seen in the Perform.Media catalogs found outside the SoFA gallery, and some work can still be seen in the gallery. Most of the pieces are interactive. Bucksbarg explained that patrons of the exhibition can hardly be called viewers anymore because the displays are so complex and require participation.\n"These destabilized terms abide at the heart of the performance of new media," he said. "A pulse that beats in the moment, when one has engaged, immersed, performed or shared, and something happens in a play of both intent and accident ... Perform.Media seeks to embrace this dynamic"