iDMAa

International Digital Media and Arts Association

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VOL. 6 NO. 2 FALL 2009

Published: October 15, 2009
V6N2 Cover

According to iDMAa Journal editor Jeff Ritchie, we all experience a mental “lag.” He says, due to the time it takes to actively perceive the world, we never really live in the present, but rather, in what he calls, the “experiential past.” This year’s conference theme adopts this frenetic idea where the future is unobtainable and never actually experienced. Tomorrow becomes today and the only reality we know is “an ephemeral present that we think we are experiencing yet is actually located in the experiential past due to the above mentioned physiological lag in perceiving and processing information.”

As an academic, we often concern ourselves with with critiquing artifacts. Ritchie goes on to say that, with some predictive exceptions, “the work of criticism neither focuses on the future nor really on the present, but on the past and is by its nature just as much an historical artifact as the artifact itself.” In a world where we live in an experiential past or unobtainable future, designing for interactivity requires understanding, predicting, and then designing and developing potential actions/interactions.

In this volume, the art described in Eber’s article or Cliquet’s idea of datatainment both detail historical phenomena, yet these historical documents may in some small way allow us to imagine or predict better what might yet be. Petite, Dinh, and Fisher’s article “Towards a Transmedia Search Engine: A User Study on Perceiving Analogies in Multimedia Data” illustrates their movement toward refining search engines that extend beyond textual and metadata searches and constitutes a vastly different way in which data on the internet can be used. O’Neil’s paper on “Remix Identity” “interprets the superabundance of video mash-ups (the remixed/repurposed media creations that have made YouTube iconic) as a generational, aesthetic response to identity crisis.” George-Palilonis, et al, document their past struggles with teaching students how to create new interface designs for delivering news to mobile phones in their paper “Research Informed Design.” Nyhoff’s paper “Performing the Interface” expands upon historical discussions of the theatricality of the graphical user interface. And Burg, et al, detail ways in which educators might better incorporate sound into digital media courses. All of these papers deal with past patterns, trends, objects, or ideas, yet all can help us better chart out our own future interactions, ideas, and projects.

In a world defined by rapid change, we need to reduce the lag in how quickly we understand and react to this change. For those curmudgeons out there, we actually can learn something from Beatniks and Hippies. Often we are either unable to see the pattern of changes unfolding around us or choose not to question the paradigms of our world, yet all of us would agree that we have to understand the past and see beyond paradigmatic thinking in order to understand what is actually happening and successfully plan for the future. I trust that you might think, as I do, that the annual iDMAa conference and these conference proceedings can provide us with the means of readily understanding both what has occurred and what might yet.
(A Synopsis of Jeff Ritchie’s article “What Might yet.” Click here for full text.)

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The Journal of The International Digital Media and Arts Association responds to the rapidly developing field of digital media and arts in a variety of settings—academic, educational, artistic, political, and social. Membership in iDMAa includes a subscription to the journal. Get more information on becoming a member.

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