Foreword

A conference journal in a perfect world should be an immersive experience, or, better yet, have a tiny time machine built in so that we can go back in time and really see what happened. Okay, the world isn’t perfect, but in its own beautiful low-tech way this journal captures the essence of what occurred in San Diego. This version of the conference journal is like the last one in that the topics are far ranging, the insights thought provoking, and the authors articulate. What interests me is that some topics reappear while others go away. Different conference, different topics, right? I would argue that over time these shifts will be observed as something more profound. This “thing” we are all looking at is changing with each passing week, day, hour, minute—you pick. This “field” of digital media and arts is much like the software we complain about learning all the time: Another new version? What was wrong with the last one? (The answer is “nothing,” of course!) A strange combination of commerce, technology, and the human spirit drives these processes and nothing will stop it until our heads explode. (My hat is feeling a little tight lately…)

But back to the point, which is that these snapshots are important because without them we can’t tell how far we have traveled. This is combined with our most important job, which is to remember. A recent report I read talked about how “young people” are less able to remember basic personal information than their elders. Just where will that take us? As we dive headlong into a world where we forget more and more and just plain miss a lifetime’s worth of information in a day, it is more and more important to articulate, codify, and institutionalize important thoughts and perspectives. Blogs are great, but who doesn’t like a cool looking journal to lug to the coffee shop?

Keep thinking, keep reading and keep writing,

Michael Niederman, Executive Editor
Columbia College Chicago

P.S. A moment to recognize the real heroes of this work; To Jeff for shaping it, to Randall for transforming it and to Sharon for making sure I don’t embarrass myself.

Download V4N2 PDF Version

In this issue

• V4N2: Digital Media and Change: A Literary/Historical Perspective

  By Jeff Ritchie | July 18, 2013

  Just as the river where I step is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not. —Heraclitus Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystallisation. The perfect rose is only […]

• V4N2: Exembellishment: Using the eXtensible Markup Language as a Tool for Storytelling

  By Natalie Underberg, Rudy McDaniel | July 18, 2013

  Metadata is data about data, or descriptive data that is intended to describe or represent preexisting data from another source. Such data does not need to be visible to the user; in fact, metadata is often invisible and works behind the scenes in much the same fashion as hypertext markup language, or HTML. XML is one such metadata classification system that is derived from SGML (the same parent language of HTML) and is intended to eventually replace the HTML 4+ specification as XHTML 1.0.

• V4N2: Mix/Remix as Epistemology: The Implications of the Metamedium, Digital Media

  By Jamie O’Neil | July 18, 2013

  “In particular, I want to show that definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed.” Neil Postman, Media as Epistemology 1985 […]

• V4N2: New Grotesques: New-Media Process in Old-Media Product

  By Seth Ellis | July 18, 2013

  The “new grotesque,” as I use the phrase, refers to the irruption of new-media paradigms into traditional media. I take the term “grotesque” from Mikhail Bakhtin, whose use of the term has been tremendously influential […]

• V4N2: Split Narrative Films and the Problem of Attention Engagement

  By Nitzan Ben Shaul | July 18, 2013

  The digital revolution’s development of the hypertext and the post-modern episteme consonant with it, have generated far-reaching changes in the structure of narrative films. Film narrative theorists supporting this revolution envision a future form of […]

• V4N2: Teaching Creative Collaboration through Teams: Concept, Communication, and Conflict in Team Instruction

  By John S. Dahlberg, Ben Dunkle | July 18, 2013

  Students and practitioners of the creative process demonstrate Guilford’s assertion that we all have creative potential; however we develop that potential in very different ways. Artists, poets, and composers variously create. Yet, their creations are […]

• V4N2: The Core Principles of Digital Media

  By J. Michael Moshell | July 18, 2013

  The community of educators who say that they are working in digital media is diverse, and strongly overlaps with pre-existing academic disciplines such as art, animation, communications, computer science, film, television, and music.

• V4N2: The State of the Arts of Digital

  By Dena Elisabeth Eber | July 18, 2013

  We are presently experiencing a cultural shift in the evolution of how we use digital tools in all art forms, one that I believe the art world is still struggling to understand. In 1995, when an artist used a computer in any way, she was known as a computer artist, which then meant that the artist used a computer.

• V4N2: Visual Literacy in the Vertical Age: The semiotic implications of nonlinear and vertical structures in contemporary narratives

  By Brigid Maher | July 18, 2013

  In recent years the shift and embracement of ‘achronological’ or nonlinear narratives has become pervasive within mainstream television and cinema. Televisions shows such as Lost play with the narrative’s chronology by jumping back and forth in time through flashbacks.

• V4N2: Web Journalism: From the Inverted Pyramid to the Tumbled Pyramid

  By João Manuel Messias Canavilhas | July 18, 2013

  Media development is quick to register improvements in the distribution channels. The American press, for instance, grew considerably along with the railway system as the latter began to expand, since newspapers could now reach farther.

• V4N2:Humanizing the Machine: Women Artists and the Shifting Praxis and Criticism in Computer Art

  By Grant D. Taylor | July 18, 2013

  A new kind of renaissance is beginning. All those now working visually with the computer are Giottos announcing the coming of a new visual age. Collette Bangert, 1976 A computer is never lifeless. It hums […]