Project > Cretive Industries:

Code Zebra

Join Sara Diamond and her locked-up international guests and moderators at code Zebra as they debate, play and invent.

What happens when curious interrogators, opponents or collaborators are locked up together? Will they flirt, shift shape, and cannibalize each other's identities? Will they invent something that can make our troubled world a better place? During DEAF 2003, Code Zebra will place multidisciplinary pairs of artists and scientists together in a beautiful but closed cage for twenty-four hour periods. We will ask them to solve scientific, technological and related ethical problems, invent something new, and entertain us with a stream of great ideas. We will provide them with toys, games, media and design tools; things to read and watch; and each other. They will have surveillance tools, a constant video stream out and in; access to the Internet; the Code Zebra OS, a web-based visual chat that enables conversations between different individuals and groups on the Internet; good food and a great view. The public is invited to monitor and interact throughout each day (24/7), via Code Zebra and DEAF web streams, asking the locked up duo questions, discussing issues with them, providing them with new problems to solve. Of course, all of this plays out against the current global political and cultural trauma.

Expert moderators will join them and the public at frequent intervals to prompt and play. There will be broadband coverage and interaction every four hours when reality television video documentarian Victoria Mapplebeck (creator of Smart Hearts) enters the habituation cages.

Tuesday, February 25, 17:00 p.m. to Wednesday, February 26, 17:00 p.m.

• PAUL WONG: video artist, curator, performance artist, On Edge, Canada
• NINA WAKEFORD: ethnographer, mobile technologies expert, University of Surrey, UK
• Surveillance, its pleasures and terrors
• Technologies of body and mind that create distance and proximity
• Multiple identities in forced and chosen intimacies, in the spaces of the net and web
• Performance: near and far
• Desire, its technologies and mediations
• Actions on the terror, danger and power of mobility
• Being locked up
• Mutual ethnography: race, gender, desire, counter-cultures

Thursday, February 27th, 10 a.m to Friday, February 28th, 10 a.a.m.. LOCKED UP!

• Mary Flanagan: games design, chaos theorist, USA
• Tom Donaldson: inventor, intelligent systems expert, engineer, UK
• The process of invention
• Chaotic systems
• Personalization: computer virology and biology of surveillance
• Evolutionary systems: intelligence, human, animal and machine
• Carbon versus silicon
• What can the presence and decay of the biological provide us with
• The ethics of inventing life forms
• You both like games: playing and invention

Watch for interventions by moderators:

• Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskew: Aboriginal cultural producer, theorist, performance artist
• Mark Tribe: Creator of Rhizome, Internet theorist
• Erik Kluitenberg: Internet activist, theorist and educator
• Nat Muller: collaborations expert
• Nina Czegledy: curator and biotech theorist
• Machiko Kusahara: robotics and mobile culture theorist and inventor
• Steve Marsh: inventor of socially adept technologies

More details on the habituation cage dwellers

Nina Wakeford

is a Foundation Fund Lecturer in Sociology and Social Methodology. For her D. Phil. at Nuffield College, Oxford, she studied the experiences of mature students using a sociological conception of risk. Before coming to the University of Surrey in September of 1998, she spent three years studying "Women's Experiences of Virtual Communities", funded by an ESRC Post-Doctoral grant. The last two years of this Fellowship she conducted fieldwork in and around Silicon Valley while based at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, Dr. Wakeford is the Director of INCITE. Her past research has included ethnographic work in the UK and the USA on computing and internet culture, including studies of cybercafes, online discussion groups and new media start-up companies. As well as studies of technology she is interested in the sociology of sexuality, in particular the use of queer theory, and the potential intersections between such critical cultural theory, innovative ethnography and design practice. She has undertaken collaborative projects with companies including British Telecom, Fuji Xerox, Intel and Sapient.

Paul Wong

creates work in video, performance, photography and installation. He is a media arts pioneer and veteran, the first and youngest artist to break many barriers in the Canadian art scene when he picked up his first Portapak camera. Many of his projects were developed for site-specific contexts, unique public venues, community centres, artist-run spaces, festivals, museums, closed-circuit broadcast and television. In 1992, he was the recipient of the Bell Canada Award for Video Art in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the development of the art form. In addition, he is an active cultural strategist in Vancouver and nationally. He co-founded the Video In Studios (1973), Canada's leading electronic arts access, production, distribution and exhibition centre. He is also the Artistic Director of On Edge (founded 1985), a non-profit organization that initiates challenging art projects. Both organizations import and export international programmes, host visiting artists, curate exhibitions and publish books on new popular culture. In 2002, he was honoured with a retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a victory for Wong, after his work, Confused: Sexual Views was censored by the same gallery in 1984, sparking a wholesale uprising by the art community across Canada. On Becoming A Man - an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (Sept.21, 1995-Jan.7, 1996) was a solo exhibition of eleven selected video works by Wong made between 1976-1995. The four multi-media installations remounted in their original forms were: in ten sity, Confused: Sexual Views, Chinaman's Peak: Walking The Mountain and Mixed Messages. The seven single-channel videotapes were 60 Unit Bruise, 4, Prime Cuts, Confused, Body Fluid, Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade and So Are You.

Tom Donaldson

graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Engineering, specializing in electronics and information theory. Tom then joined a corporation creating breakthrough new products for major blue chip corporations. After his stint there, Tom felt it was time to explore the more experimental realms of technology innovation. Tom moved to New York as an inventor/artist. He explored new areas of technology-led storytelling, including a subconsciously interactive film system, an enhanced-reality gaming system, and haptic artworks. Tom has recently been working in the mobile Internet industry. He created a mobile Internet service nominated as the best consumer application in annual industry awards. He has founded an artificial intelligence software company, delivering highly personalized user-experiences in the web and mobile worlds, and is recognized as an industry-leader in personalization. Wherever he works, Tom uses advances in technology to explore new avenues in creativity, and uses exploratory artworks to shed new light on the direction and purpose of technology.

Mary Flanagan

is a media practitioner/theorist who investigates the intersection of art, technology, and gender study through critical writing, artwork, and activism. An award-winning media developer and artist, Flanagan has exhibited her work at such venues as the Central Fine Arts Gallery in Soho, the Guggenheim Gallery Online at Chapman University, The Physics Room, NZ, Moving Image Center, NZ, turbulence.org, New York Hall of Science, UCR/California Museum of Photography, and the Whitney 2002 Biennial. She is also the creator of "The Adventures of Josie True", the first web-based adventure game for girls. Arts. In her critical writing, Flanagan investigates the connection between media technology & culture. Flanagan's essays on digital art, cyberculture, and gaming have appeared in periodicals such as Art Journal, Wide Angle, Convergence, and Culture Machine, and her co-edited book reload: rethinking women + cyberculture was published by MIT Press in 2002. Essays/chapters are included in the following forthcoming books: First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (MIT Press), Knowing Mass Culture/Mediating Knowledge (Indiana University Press), and Digital Media Revisited (MIT Press). With interests in gaming culture, science and epistemology, interfaces, cyberfiction, how women learn/relate to technology, and aspects of nature and culture, Flanagan's work explores the cutting edge of new technologies and cultural change.

Code Zebra's Sara Diamond

is an award-winning television and new media producer/director, video artist, curator, critic, researcher, teacher and artistic director. Born in New York City, Diamond is currently the Artistic Director, Media and Visual Arts and Executive Producer, Television and New Media at The Banff Centre for the Arts, responsible for shaping Banff Centre programs in this area. Beginning in 1995, Diamond developed the internationally recognized Banff New Media Institute for research and exploration in new media. She has created interactive media curriculum and events and has created think-tanks that bring together technology industries; new media content producers and companies, artists and investors. In recent years, she has developed Banff's research and development projects in software and authoring tools, advanced visualization and collaborative systems. The Co-Production, Human Centered Interface, Horizon Zero and Deep Web projects that she has initiated at The Banff Centre for the Arts have resulted in key international projects in interactive media and television. Diamond programs new media events for the prestigious Banff Television Festival and develops the extensive Banff New Media Institute at The Banff Centre. She participates in the Canadian cultural industries SAGIT, Cultural Diversity Advisory committee and ICT Implementation committee for Alberta, as well as on numerous juries such as the Webbies, Viper, and Research Development Initiatives (SSHRC). She is an Adjunct Professor in the UCLA Design/Media program and a researcher associated with SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, UK. Diamond is creating Code Zebra, a visualization and conference authoring software and related live events, including dance and spoken word.