Tamara Vukov has been active in experimental/documentary film and video production, community radio and sound, digital media, and social activism for over ten years. She is a member of the Montréal-based Volatile Works media arts collective (http://www.volatileworks.org). Her video, film, and new media work has been presented in numerous film and new media festivals (Canada, Germany, Belgium, Australia, the U.S., the U.K., France, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and Argentina), as well as in various community-based screenings, autonomous spaces, and independent compilations. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation in the Joint PhD in Communication at Concordia University (a joint program with the Université de Montréal and l’Université du Québec à Montréal), in which she is looking at the role of recent news media events around immigration in the securitization of Canadian immigration policy.

Abstract

Notes on the Politics of New Media Engagement

Initiating a conversation at the Digital Poetics and Politics Summer Institute in August of 2004, Ayesha Hameed and Tamara Vukov began an exchange that has built over the past fifteen months through face to face discussion, e-mail, and other digital forms on the possibilities, challenges and obstacles we face as two scholar/artists attempting to do theoretical and creative work across a range of media forms (textual, aural, visual) in a manner that the rubric of “new media” now allows. We recognized in each other’s earlier projects (Ayesha’s sea/myth build (http://www.students.yorku.ca/~ayesha/htm/portfolio.htm) and Tamara’s Balkan Mediations (http://www.pomgrenade.org/) attempts to experiment with and bridge the divide between textual/theoretical and visual/aural/multimedia modes, while also resisting the pitfalls and utopian hype of new media neoliberalism. We have pursued the conversation across oral and digital forms, touching on everything from formal concerns and reception to copyleft and collaborative writing practices, reshaping, cutting and pasting fragments, and rendering it into the current piece that preserves the ephemeral and fragmentary form of our conversations for this digital issue of Public.