Student Moderator: Elizabeth LeDoux
Faculty Respondent: Philip Kain
(M.P.S., M.A., New York University; B.A., Rutgers College)
Mr. Kain writes a column on Net Culture for About.com and appears weekly on the nationally syndicated television news magazine, Cafe Digital. His performance work has been presented at Lincoln Center, The Joyce, P.S. 122, Dixon Place, The Westbeth, DIA Soho, and Judson Church. He is currently completing his Ph.D. at New York University.

PANEL:

Vincent Carducci
Symptoms as Solution: Sherry Turkle's "Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet"
(Click here to download paper)

Abstract: Sherry Turkle is known as "the Margaret Mead of cyberspace," primarily as a result of her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Based on her research into online environments such as Multi-User Domains (MUDs), newsgroups, bulletin boards, and chat rooms, Turkle proposes that recent advances in computer technology enables "ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity" that are quintessentially postmodern. This paper compares Turkle's view of postmodernism with her sources to ascertain the validity of her readings and their relevance in understanding the social and cultural implications of online relationships.

Girija Kaimal
Sound Bytes from the Field: The Internet and Community Problem-Solving
(Click here to download paper)

Abstract: Not available at this time.

Michael Arnold Mages
Mutual Assured Deconstruction: An Exploration of the Nature and Quality of Computer-Mediated Telepresence
(Click here to download paper)

Abstract: Although there are those who deride the characteristic developments surrounding the rise of the Internet as a naive, utopian, and complex multi-channel communications medium, it is indisputable that the advent of the networked society has provided a formerly mute audience with agency to "feedback" into the system of content dissemination. Although changes in communications media are frequently reflected or augured in the Arts, this development has gone largely unnoticed in the realm of Western music. Even in rock or jazz concerts, the audience remains a tertiary adjunct to the nature or quality of the performance. Mutual Assured Deconstruction (MAD) is a democratized, musical-interactive space that a participant can inhabit both proximally and through the agency of a software-based representation over an Internet protocol-type network in real time. The primary goals of MAD are to conduct inquiry into the nature and quality of computer-mediated interaction and telepresence, to examine the transformative effect that new media has on the set of relationships engendered by a performance situation (primarily the audience-performer-artist triumvirate), and to establish concepts of space, experience and the body.

Giovanna Pagano
The Enactive Mark of Virtual Reality
(Click here to download paper)

Abstract: This paper applies the enactive theory of cognition in order to explain human knowledge of virtual worlds. The description of virtual reality systems is grounded in concepts such as presence, immersion, interactivity and cyberspace. VR systems are defined as a cognitive technology that provides constitutive perceptions and is based on the employment of the cognitive capabilities of the human body. VR technology powerfully proves the non-existence of any objective world independent from the lived experience of the percipient and independent from life as a cognitive process. Virtual worlds are viewed as effects of a multidisciplinary science constituting an autonomous reality that requires systems, technologies and, above all, human beings for existing.