File BNMI.1H.11 - "Bridges Consortium II" : [agenda]

File consists of two copies of the agenda, for the summit held October 4-6, 2002. The program description reads:

"The objective of Bridges II was to explore a series of new trends in research practices — especially in the domain of interdisciplinary collaboration between arts and social science researchers, scientists, engineers, and artists' and to consider the implications of these trends for our practices.

The first Bridges conference was held in 2001 at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California (http://www.annenberg.edu/BRIDGES) in partnership with the Banff New Media Institute. It brought together almost 70 participants from nine countries (Japan, France, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Canada, United Kingdom, United States and Africa) to initiate dialogue between art, culture, science and technology. Its purpose was to establish the need and role for ongoing dialogue between artists and scientists in the landscape of “new technologies.” Participants came from established centres or artists’ formations. Hence, this event helped construct the history of collaboration between artists and scientists/engineers and highlighted the various methodologies that have emerged. The second Bridges conference extended the disciplinary realm to include social science and humanities researchers as partners in the culture and science collaboration. It increased the number of science researchers and was truly international in its outreach.

At the end of the first Bridges conference, a number of areas for further discussion were established as well as the priority for extending the conversation to a broader creative and scholarly community. At the forefront was the need for an extended debate on identifying problems of language, principles, and ethics with research collaborations. Bridges II, with its keywords of “collaboration, communication, and convergence”, aimed to pursue these areas explicitly and in an overtly multi/inter/cross-disciplinary structure. The conference program was shaped in the belief that the great challenge of convergence is not technology, but communication between people. For this reason, we concentrated on both the philosophy and the pragmatics of collaboration.

Since Bridges 2001, there were a number of key changes in the landscape of the new media research and creation communities. First there was an accelerated downturn in the dotcom sector, leading to some conservative trends in research funding. Then there was the crisis of September 11th, with an ongoing state of war, which affected research priorities, especially in the United States. On the other hand, in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe, there were new institutes and centers within universities that were committed to collaborative research and received impressive capital investment. New, casual formations, national and international, as well as networks, sprung up that crossed artistic and activist, and artistic and commercial, agendas. Initiatives began or stabilized in countries traditionally associated with a lack of technology access.

Bridges II pinpointed collaboration itself as a skill to be identified, studied, and learned, and provided both plenary lectures and a series of case studies to propose practical strategies for including it as a vital component in education, creation, and research. The objective was to identify best practices, amplify existing networks and stimulate the development of others — all to provide a means of productive communication for those engaged in the reality of collaborative research. We recognized the particular challenges when these collaborations reached across the assumptions and practices of very different fields: science, social science, and humanities, art.

Differences in work styles, priorities, language use and invention, communication styles, educational principles, pedagogical practices, institutional frameworks, temperaments, and even fundamental values have the potential to become either obstacles or stimulants to effective collaboration. And creating with ever-more complex technology requires greater specialization as well as better collaboration between technicians, creators, and users. Responding to concerns identified at, and surveying the changing field since Bridges 2001, Sara Diamond and Susan Bennett proposed a range of panels. Some included a variety of position papers to evoke a “roundtable” style of discussion and others with more traditional papers and formal respondents — as well as a series of working groups who, on each day of the conference, interrogated and synthesized materials based on guiding principles and questions set by a working group facilitator. Sessions in these formats were intended specifically to address some of the complexities of the collaborative endeavor. There were evening festival presentations of documentation of new works and work in progress from participants.

The field, up to the date of Bridges II, had been, not surprisingly, dominated by researchers located in the United States. While key American researchers were rightly part of the community for Bridges Two, we used our best endeavors to extend the network. The diversity of representation opened up discussion to the particular challenges of internationally based networks and collaborations and activated a far wider network than previously existed in this research field.

The emphasis for Bridges II was on the cultural contexts as well as ethical and aesthetic dimensions and practical challenges to research collaboration between humanists, social scientists, scientists, engineers, and artists. We were also concerned to address, through focused sessions, the implications of such work for public policy in this area and, in a related vein, the implications for training the next generation of researchers so that we better enable the kinds of inter/multi/cross-disciplinary collaboration that technological environments insist upon. Since it is undoubtedly crucial that we pay direct attention to the training and development of young researchers, we identified a number of roles for graduate students within Bridges II.

We invited several graduate students to participate in the program and we encouraged other institutions to include their graduate students in the organization-working group. The graduate students were involved in the presentation of position papers, the facilitation of workshops and also worked with members of the organizing committee to prepare a final report on Bridges II for web-based circulation. We also expected their full participation in the working groups on each day of the conference.

In summary, Bridges 2001 brought together a group that might well be considered the “old guard” of the new media world; Bridges II represented the culmination of a year of dramatic change — specifically in Canada — through the availability of research investment for this area. At the same time, broadcasters, the communications industries, and artists’ centers were moving towards digital media and new media — and the dissemination of technologies accelerated. Bridges II insisted on a philosophical as well as practical analysis of this particular moment and did so in recognition of the possibility of alliances far beyond the scope of G8. We expected our outcomes to include publications on these debates, policy needs, future trends, possible working partnerships and strategies."