DAC 2007 blogged, facebooked, videoed etc

I enjoyed this year’s DAC (Digital Arts & Culture) conference as much as any other year: it is in many way what I consider my “home conference” and many of the colleagues that I have also come to consider as friends by now, are people I met at my first DAC conference back in 1999. It is always nice to meet up with them, and equally interesting to see new faces and get to talk to new people who have found their way to the conference.  Each DAC conference has its own particular flavour, emerging from the mix of the hosting institution, the hosting country, the emerging themes of the conference  and the people present. This year’s conference was clearly influenced by its co-location (spatial & temporal) with the Biennale of Electronic Art Perth (BEAP), which meant that we got to see – and hear a lot – about a number of very different art projects. Bioart and data art are genres of digital art I didnt know much about before, but now feel at least acquainted with.  But there was also a lot of thought-provoking presentations on many other subjects (including some very interesting ones on social software, “web 2.0” etc), which Im simply too jetlagged to summarise or say anything clever about, so I’ll just share some of the post-conference DAC links with you:

Despite the lack of wireless internet on site, it turns out that Axel Bruns of Snurblog (which I talked to for the first time f2f at this conference) has done a very thorough job of blogging all the presentations he attended at DAC2007, including mine. Read the posts gathered in his DAC2007 category and you will get a pretty good overview of this year’s conference content.

Scott Rettberg posted a very quick summary and a video from the last night of the conference  at Grand Text Auto – a group of scandinavians (incl. yours truly) , locals and US folks going crazy at the local “hi-pee” club. The time spent there was definitely was a cultural experience!

Tama Leaver also did a nice conference wrap-up, with more extensive summaries of some of the papers, he liked best and Christy Dena has a good post, summarising some of the artwork  and art trends, and asking what happened to the papers talking about the future? (if you use IE, scroll to the bottom and you will get it, it is not an empty post!). In another post, Christy includes DAC 2007 as one of the events where she got to meet some of the folks whose work she’d been reading “in real life” (for me, too, that was what the exitement of  my first DAC was very much about…)

Finally, I started a DAC 2007 – Perth group on Facebook, partly as an experiment. So far it has only got 16 members and there is not a lot of activity but I do hope that it can serve as a place to keep the DAC community alive for a while, while it is decided who will host the next DAC conference in 2009 (a decision in which I will also take part as member of the DAC academic steering committee – so I’ll post about it as soon as we know anything).