ISEA 2015 Vancouver, Canada

We were delighted that so many of our projects were accepted to this years ISEA conference. Under the topic “Disruption” artists and academics from all over the world met between Aug 14-19 at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver/Canada. The conference schedule was tight and we started 2 days prior the official start of the conference with a full day of workshops. The first workshop we attended was lead by the grand dame of Net activism Carmin Karasic from Electronic Disturbance Theater “The Hacktivism Seed of Discourse“.

The afternoon session was reserved for our “Revisiting the Spam folder – Using 419 fiction for interactive digital storytelling” workshop. We had over 20 participants and most of the interested audience shared their interesting projects they were working on during the next couple of days.

After the first day we had nearly every day some presentations to do: we presented the “Let’s talk business” artwork in the demo session, presented the Research Lab “Behind the Smart World: 22 harddrives from a West African e-waste dump” in the poster/artist talk session and Andreas presented his long paper “Scambaiters, Human Flesh Search Engine, Perverted justice, and Internet Haganah: Villains, Avengers, or Saviors on the Internet?“.

The keynotes were done by Brian Massumi, Michael Connor (Rhizome, NYC), Dominique Moulon, Hildegard Westerkamp and Sara Diamond, with the The Yes Men closing the symposium with an address on the use of creative expression for subversion and disruption.

And yes, there was still 2 days before and 3 days after the conference were we had some time to see the city and go hiking in the sourrounding area.