The Work of the Local in the Age of Globalization

For well over a decade, we have seen the flourishing of personal publishing, home music recording, web movies, and alternative journalism using the web, email, satellites, etc. But these phenomena—which can be seen as democratizing the media institutions of music, literature, art and film – are also met with increasing modes of corporate control and sanctions. Issues such as pirating or copyright infringement are cited as reasons to limit the production and accessibility of alternative digital spaces. The commodity-cluttered and ephemeral space of the web, unequal access and development, as well as the political economies and aesthetic vocabularies of technologically driven cultural forms, creates interesting cunundrums for the digital artist and theorist. The combined DVD/Website that comprise this special issue of Public, provides responses to such issues and conditions, which are inextricable from global networks, flows of capital, and migration.

The twenty-five contributors to this issue represent the majority of the participants in the Digital Politics and Poetics Summer Instituted, held at Queen’s University in August 2004. The Digipopo Institute, which took place over the period of one week, brought together international media artists, social science and humanities academics, and cultural workers to explore in both practical and theoretical terms the effects of globalization policies and technological developments on the politics and poetics of new media uses. We all believe that work done on digital media arts needs to be informed by humanities and social science discourses as well as by a close understanding of media aesthetics.

The week-long experience of proximity, duration, and the conversation that could only come from sharing this space and time, emphasized to us the limitations of digital geographies. Yet, it is precisely the digital that enabled our meeting and our continuous work on this project. The Institute was purposively designed as a works-in-progress event, from which developed many collaborations both during and after that week in August. In our efforts to maintain the work-in-progress spirit, the website will be alive and many of the works on the DVD (including essays) are manifestations of projects that are still ongoing. The editorial collective established for this issue of Public emerged organically through discussions on our listserv and it became clear to us that a digital format was needed because each presentation had a digital component. We did not want to perpetuate practices that privileged the written text at the expense of the digital artwork’s multimedia nature. The specific digital experiment of this issue of Public actualizes one of Public Access’s primary mandates: to create spaces for the production, reception, and discourse about the place of public art.

The main website for this issue can stand alone and can be launched from the DVD/DVD-ROM. Between these two platforms, there are twenty-five contributions ranging from websites, digitally-illustrated essays, digital visual artworks, audio and sound works, to documentary video works and animation, to traditional essays. There are also links to contributors’ websites about fair use and copyright, translocal neighborhoods between Merida, Mexio and Los Angeles, interactive city scapes, and democracy seeking software.

Glenn Gear, Susan Lord, Dorit Naaman, Matt Soar, Miriam Verburg
Editors