Digital Design. Living Surfaces Conference.
If a conference’s quality can be divined from its lineage, then the American Center for Design’s Living Surfaces: Toward Digital Literacy is shaping up to be a fantastic festival of binary beauty. The event’s co-chairs, I.D. Magazine’s Chee Pearlman and Doris Mitsch, cofounder of Doris and Clancy Ltd., have assembled an impressive group of computer visionaries to expound upon the neo-esthetics of interactive media.
Wired’s own John Plunkett and Wired Digital’s Barbara Kuhr will explain the trials of developing a unified design scheme for symbiotic print and Web publications. At the other end of the design/content spectrum, Denise Caruso plans to lead a tour of the editorial side of the virtual landscape. Caruso, a New York Times writer and an analyst for Interval Research, is known for cutting through the prevailing techno hype and framing up-and-coming issues.
Microsoft’s Linda Stone, who last year described the difficulty of designing a-life avatars, will once again help fill the geek quotient at this year’s event. So will Purple Moon’s Kristee Rosendahl, who plans to tackle identity, gender, and other complex issues when she discusses the design problems she faces while crafting PC games specifically for girls.
In all, this confab is meant to cover not just the changes in the way designers work as a result of new technologies, but also the changes that computers have wrought upon work itself.
"When people used to talk about digital media, they meant using computers to create print and film," Mitsch says. "Now, we’re not only designing familiar things using computers, we’re also making things that until recently didn’t exist."
Whisk away to the Windy City and find out what the glitterati are creating today.
Registration: US$565 through October 24 and $665 after. Contact: +1 (312) 787 2018, fax +1 (312) 649 9518, email [email protected].
Chicago’s Inner and Outer Beauty
Way back in 1969, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art featured the artist Christo’s first building wrap in the States. Last year, the institution moved into a new building designed by architect Josef Paul Kleihues. Today, the museum sports a stunning example of the Chicago Modern style, so the edifice doesn’t really need to be covered up.
Lest you think that the museum’s beauty is a mere façade, check out some of the shows to be held this December. Jasper Johns, widely recognized as the father of pop art, has an exhibition. And Toshio Shibata, a photographer known for gelatin silver prints that depict structures at odds with the natural environment, will receive his first American solo exhibition during the same period.
This winter, gawk at Chicago’s architectural wonder known as the Museum of Contemporary Art, and then hurry into its heated galleries, where some paintings and photographs will provide the perfect complement to the digital dissections at the Living Surfaces conference.
The Current Roundup (see Wired 5.09)
October 22-24 Avatars ’97; San Francisco. October 23-25 Images of Politics: History and Development of Political Communication on Television; Amsterdam. November 3-8 Globecom ’97; Phoenix. November 6-8 The Politics of Access to Computer-Assisted Education; Chicago. November 8-14 ACM Multimedia ’97; Seattle. November 12-14 Interactive Publishing Europe; Zurich.
November 8-9 Animation: An Exploration of Japanese Anime; Banff, Canada The Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta has commissioned an all-star lineup of anime impresarios, including Osamu Tezuka, Masumune Shirow, and Shigeru Miyamoto, to demonstrate the fantastic power of this genre of Japanese animation. Featuring film screenings and demonstrations by the Museum of Video Games, this graphical gala will display the wonders of the art form in all its supernatural glory. Registration: US$300. Contact: +1 (403) 762 6180, on the Web at www-nmr.banffcentre.ab.ca/.
November 13-15 Bionomics: Living with Perpetual Evolution; San Francisco According to this event’s Cato Institute organizers, economic activity can be predicted and accounted for by employing certain biological models. Discussions, including those by telecommunications analyst Peter Huber and sci-fi author Gregory Benford, will focus on how individual and corporate organisms can cope with technological evolution. Registration: price unavailable. Contact: +1 (202) 789 5296, email [email protected].
November 20-21 Online Games ’97; Los Angeles This seminar hopes to discover new revenue models for Internet-based gaming. Last year, 3DO’s Trip Hawkins and executives from Sega, Mpath, and TEN explained how to battle into the black in the TCP play arena. This year’s event will offer similar insights and a demo panel, which will introduce newcomers in the developing webutainment industry. Registration: US$1,290. Contact: +1 (212) 780 6060, email [email protected], on the Web at www.jup.com/.
November 27-29 The Virtual Campus: Trends for Higher Education and Training; Madrid This education extravaganza, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing, offers the latest research into distributed learning environments. Held at the Spanish Distance Learning University, this event provides an opportunity to schmooze with educators from faraway lands. Registration: about US$175. Contact: +34 (1) 398 7993, fax +34 (1) 398 6028, on the Web at www.ieec.uned.es/~ifip97/.
December 3-6 Living Surfaces: Toward Digital Literacy; Chicago See information above.
December 4-5 The Impact of the Internet on Communications Policy; Cambridge, Massachusetts Haahvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government sponsors this wonkathon, which invites prominent scholars and high-level government officials to speculate on the coming changes in communications policy resulting from the meteoric ascent of digital information technologies. Registration: US$495. Contact: +1 (617) 496 1389, fax +1 (617) 495 5776, email nora_o’[email protected].
The Usual Suspects
November 17-21 Comdex/Fall ’97; Las Vegas. Contact: email [email protected], on the Web at www.comdex.com/comdex/. December 9-12 Seybold Seminars Tokyo; Tokyo. Contact: on the Web at www.seyboldseminars.com/events/. December 8-12 Fall Internet World 97; New York. Contact: on the Web at www.events.internet.com/fall97.html.
This article originally appeared in the October issue of Wired magazine.
