4th Biennial Radiator Festival & Symposium: Exploits in the Wireless City

the 4th Biennial Radiator Festival & Symposium: Exploits in the Wireless City which takes place between 13 - 24 January 2009, please find details below of the symposium I would like to invite you, your colleagues and students to. The focus of this symposium is on new developments in technology, communication architecture and hybrid spaces and its effects on our public and private spheres.

We feel that this would be a great opportunity for recent graduates, final year undergraduates and post-graduate students to participate as a delegate in the leading New Art Technology festivals in the UK. Themes under investigation include:

Wireless Networks or Gated Communities?

A wireless network is an ever shifting, dynamic, constant entity, with a combination of different topographies. They are difficult networks to map, measure or control. Since regulations of usage, frequencies and sharing are still in the process of being negotiated, how is access control and data manipulation being exposed, exploited, packaged and challenged?

Experiencing the E-City

Our mobility while we work, e-shop, or communicate in a wireless zone tends to make us nomadic and lets us adapt a particular space (café, park, home) to our momentary need. Spaces become multi-purpose, the workspace becomes unscheduled and deregulated. New clusters are generated. People, increasingly un-tethered from their workspaces, are nevertheless subject to more control and surveillance in an increasingly obscured manner. How does this distributed social space change people's experience of city?

The Networked City

From ambient technology such as RFID (radio frequency identification tags) to 'smart buildings', how is an increased computerisation of our environment impacting on our privacy? Are we on our way to ultimate surveillance? What possibilities for resistance do we have left?

Communication Architectures

New Social Networks and organisations come through websites, we make 'friends' with people on a suggestion, we work sat across the world from our colleagues. How has the transformation in social flow dynamics changed the usage of existing architectures?

What are the social impacts of digital communication technologies? Do communities, especially those under-represented in socio economic terms, stand to benefit from these new hybrid spaces?

Radiator and its Symposium will present work that combines an engagement with locality and community with an exploration into the possibilities of digital enhancement where the role of the city-as-communications-network is deep at its core.

Please forward this opportunity onto students, colleagues and contacts who you feel would benefit from this taking part in this event.