ram

The aim with the workshops is to create an international network of artists, technicians, designers, media activists and cultural practitioners with an array of skills in new technology, to provoke a productive and critical dialogue and an exchange between different artistic cultures using "new media" as tools in their art practice, but also to encourage the creation of new tools and forms of expression / communication. Through this exchange the interest is to advance and sophisticate the approach and use of new media which today is reshaping 'everyday life' and society at large. This collaboration project is intended to be a starting point generating future projects and prototypes, to be developed outside the series workshop.

Each workshop will be accompanied by a digital as well as a printed publication based on the same theme as the workshop itself. This publication will operate as a forum that will make the workshop results and conversations available to a larger international audience. The format of each publication will be unique, but the www.ram-net.net website perorms as a portal for all workshops.

Re-approaching new media is a project with the support of Culture 2000 Programme of the European Union and with the financial assistance by the Daniel Langlois foundation for Art, Science and Technology. RAM1 received additional support from the Swedish Institute.

ram1: representation and control interaction in computer games

The first ram workshop explored computer games as a critical platform for media art. It took place on Gotland November 2002, with invited speakers from various backgrounds, all with a relationship to computer games. In addition, the Zero-Game Studio of the Interactive Institute, located in Visby, supported the event. The central objective of The Zero-Game Studio is to evolve the nature of the gaming experience, and to extend the scope and reach of the game form to a wider audience in innovative and creative ways.

ram 1 publications

The printed publication and the website were developed in parallel, and the context of the media was displaced through the notion of Remediation, in which aspects of one media (the Hypertextual potential of html) is infused into another (the physical qualities of a printed publication).

The www.ram-net.net website features a crossreader, allowing articles provided by seven different authors to be read in parallel, with associative links. This is also implemented in the printed publication, in which each articles occupies the same only one column on each spread. Attention can then be shifted between the texts at any time.

The set-up of the two linked publications suggested game like qualities, in which the visitor / reader would have to maneuvre and explore the information flow, rather than be fed through norm based layout. New readings emerge when the material is cross referenced, and different approaches can be used; through an art interest, through the notion of the computer game, or through academic discourse.

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