ISEA 2002: Connecting Art and Technology with Transportation, Transit, Tourism, and Theory (review)

The first International Symposium on Electronic Art to take place in Asia, the Nagoya symposium in Japan contributed to closing distances between East and West while raising questions about the symposium's forms in relation to space, place and conference design. Any participant taking the journey to the conference in Japan experienced its theme— Orai: Comings and Goings—at least in terms of transportation, transit, tourism and commerce. Beyond theme, can Oraialso be seen as the conference's formal and organizational key? From the opening ceremony, through the shows, performances, discussions and panel presentations, the plurality of events, places and experiences made constant demands on one's ability to choose—the impossibility of seeing and hearing everything kept me both focused and disoriented, and continues to do so by placing demands on the possibility of observation, description and evaluation.

In the opening ceremony, at the International Design Center Nagoya, guest speaker Suda Hiroshi, the chairman of the Central Japan Railway Company, addressed the theme of Oraithrough the scope of the Japanese urban transit and communication systems. Hiroshi spoke of economic systems under the impact of internationalization and information, energy and environmental challenges, with their social and economic implications. His talk contrasted with the more abstract and holistic remarks of ISEA2002 president Kohmura Masao, who connected East and West, heavens and earth, employing a parallel between Pythagoras's music of the spheres and the I Ching. The model Hiroshi put forward, however, where self-governing communities could act as administrative units supporting wide economic blocs, stressed the connection among natural, social and economic resources, pointing to the need for urban designs to be, at once, ecologically sustainable, socially participative and economically sound. In retrospect, Hiroshi's model, which at the time seemed a bit odd in the opening ceremony of an art-and-technology symposium, offered an essential link between ISEA's nomadic artistic and academic community and the place and institution hosting the conference. This connection needs to be further examined in future conference designs, in the light of the obvious but overlooked fact that the academic conference-tourist-entertainment-consumer industry is in frank expansion.

Looking at ISEA as a social model in miniature—a geographically dispersed community of artists and researchers exploring participatory networks, nonlinear systems and different notions of authorship's intentionality and responsibility, while imagining current and future relations between technology, art and culture—one might be surprised by its tight and homogeneous academic network, which, while exploring a global connectivity, multiplicity and dimensionality, in practice tends to reinforce its own identity. If connectivity—social, artistic and otherwise—is to be fostered with rather unexpected partners, both regionally and globally, some critical discussion about process, form and design seems to be in demand.

It was just an unfortunate example, or perhaps a symptomatic one, that the only scheduled live streaming event of the conference, connecting East and West in real time—room 0 in the Harbor Hall at Nagoya Port with the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum in New York—organized by the Utrecht University of the Netherlands, did not occur for technical reasons. But the large panel did not give up. Anxious to connect with the New York museum, they tried to carry out the engagement through a long-distance cell-phone conversation, the phone being passed along from one panel member to another in a surrealist parody of dialogue. To the small audience that remained in the room, this scene was painful and embarrassing to watch, as panel members made desperate attempts to convey their message, and at the same time, understand and respond to the questions placed over the phone. Another example of difficult connection, this time not the fault of technological failure, was the simple lack of space for social contact among conference participants (or perhaps too much space), eliminating the possibility of unexpected meetings over breakfast, for instance, whose importance for networking was completely undermined by the symposium organization as it...