GRADUATE CONFERENCES 2003

The Digital Cultures Project will sponsor two graduate conferences in 2003.

UCSD: Thinking/Building/Living:
The Infrastructure of Digital Design

"This conference begins from the premise that digital infrastructures are thought, built, and lived, and that these processes operate as frameworks that simultaneously enable and disable creative social activity. In thinking infrastructures we operate through a field of possibilities opened within contemporary social, political, cultural and technical imaginations. In building infrastructures we bring these imaginations face-to-face with the material and institutional conditions of shaped environments. In living infrastructures we reproduce, reshape and resist the designs of infrastructure builders. These 'moments' of digital design, often held separate for analytic purposes, are always colliding with each other: in thinking we build, in building we live and in living we must rethink. We consume and are consumed by infrastructure."

Contact and lead organizer:
Steve Jackson
sjjackso@socialsciences.ucsd.edu
Faculty advisors:
Geof Bowker and Lev Manovich

UCI: Life By Design: Everyday Digital Culture

"The choice of the theme 'Life By Design: Everyday Digital Culture' is intended to accomplish three goals: 1) posit that we are at an historical moment in which digital culture is no longer new, but rather a given, opening the door to a 'second wave' of practice, analysis and criticism, 2) offer the term 'everyday' as a fresh starting point for a close reading of the impacts of the digital, technological, mediated and interactive, and 3) provide an interdisciplinary context, with a special emphasis on engaging a generative mix of theorists, practitioners, graduate students, faculty and community involvement."

The contact and lead organizer:
Tobey Crockett
tcrockett@earthlink.net