Stefaan Van Ryssen

Going international without going international: multinational virtual teams

This case study of a multinational virtual team project tells how students have collaborated to write a paper in country dyads. Spanning our experience over five semesters, the paper shows how students can participate in an actual cross-cultural learning alliance within the normal curriculum. In this project, students are partnered with students from another country and jointly analyze the marketing of a product in the two countries. Communicating by E-mail and the Web, they work together in virtual teams to complete this task. Analyzing the benefits--and the problems--such collaborative efforts present for our students, we offer suggestions for professors who might like to design and administer a similar project. We find that the effectiveness of such projects is dependent on the professor/instructors ability to help students overcome barriers to successful intercultural communications, not on mastery of technology.

Dutch Electronic Arts Festival '04 (DEAF'04): Affective Turbulence: The Art of Open Systems (review)

tions and concerns of some Western academics with respect to the “breakdowns” instituted by late capitalism. The dalit movement in India, the ecofeminist struggles across portions of the “Third World,” political assertions on behalf of peripheral states: These are situated in moments of discontinuity with dominant ideological discourses that force the examination of modernism. In this sense the unity inscribed in the understanding of history also comes under scrutiny. The second seminar, “Archaeology of Time,” which comprised a cross-section of intellectuals and artists, traversed such territory. The smooth notion of cyclical time in terms of, for example, the Yuga theory pertaining to ancient India was in one instance critiqued as being monolithic and contestable. Reviews, such as this one, explicate the exoticism, glorification and innocence attached to cultures commonly termed “native” or “other” within the framework of dominant ideologies, which come not only from the West. The seminar’s suggestion of the experience of time being heterogeneous, multi-layered and coexistent throws open possibilities for textmaking in which time is not simply linear and its experience not unitary. In this context, an earlier talk by author and publisher Urvashi Butalia, who responded to Parasher’s Partition Sketches, is particularly significant. Urvashi belongs to the second generation after partition. Having spotted the same silences in Parasher’s sketches as she encountered while researching The Other Side of Silence, her celebrated book on the subject, Urvashi emphasized that the intergenerational dialogue transcends the bounds of time, gender and disciplines, but at the same time the specificities of successive generations make an altogether different idiom, one more distanced and employing different language. Instead of viewing the “dissolution” of sentiment with pessimism, Urvashi suggested that the distance of later generations be viewed as a source for resolution. This suggestion is crucial to textuality, as the binarisms of inside/outside, within/without are confused, with the confusion serving as a hybrid site, creating a point from which new visions and more critical juxtapositions can be formulated. Another insightful intervention was film scholar Gayatri Chatterjea’s introduction to her developing research into Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen, Hogeschool Gent, Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium. E-mail: <stefaan .vanryssen@pandora.be>.

North America (review)

ence series posing theoretical questions as well as looking at experimentations regarding art and communication technologies. It was founded in 1985 by the philosopher Mario Costa at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Salerno and was held there seven times in a roughly bi-annual rhythm. There seem to be different reasons why Artmedia VIII was held in Paris in 2002: one is the possibility of broadening its circle of influence; another is the fact that Paris is currently a place of many interesting new electronic art activities. Artmedia VIII was co-organized by French artist Fred Forest, Costa and French writer and theoretician Annick Bureaud. They first defined the theme and the rough sequence and special focus of the sessions and then looked for the appropriate speakers to invite. The idealistic goal was to have a 50:50 ratio between theoreticians/philosophers and artists, older generations and younger generations, and foreigners from many different parts of the world and French people, women and men. In some aspects intention and reality did not quite match. The number of female presenters was low. There were no representatives from Eastern Europe, partially due to a rather tight budget that allowed only a small number of foreigners to be invited. This then led to an obvious French domination. The conference was attractive because it brought together established key personalities in the field, such as Costa, Forest, Roy Ascott and Pierre Lévy, and artists and theoreticians from a younger generation such as Oliver Auber, Andreas Broeckmann, Maurice Benayoun, Tina Cassani and Bruno Beusch, Steven Dietz, Eduardo Kac, Wolfgang Strauss, Victoria Vesna and many others. During the first 3 days, 45 presentations, most of them in French with simultaneous translation, were given. The conference concluded on the fourth day with a panel discussion. The topics of the sessions progressed in a succinct way from history to body, cortex and networks. Personally, I found the first sessions very hard to follow, perhaps because philosophical issues were presented in a rather complicated manner, with too few references to actual artworks or other familiar examples. In contrast, the sessions on “video games and hybrid arts,” “net art in the museum context” and “architecture, urban design and communication technologies” were very illustrative and interesting, but in some respects also a bit superficial. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the professional presentation of Beusch and Cassani, who gave an overview of mobile gaming, and also the enlightening speeches about curating net art by the curators Dietz (Walker Art Center) and Jemima Rellie (Tate Gallery). The third day, Sunday, was the most exciting day of Artmedia VIII, because finally some rather provocative thoughts were expressed. It started with Lévy’s presentation of a taxonomy for cultural design. This talk was not entirely appreciated because of the lack of chaos and dynamism in his new approach. Broeckmann criticized Lévy’s simplification or idealization of cyberspace and the idea that, though there is not necessarily a collective intelligence, there could well be a collective stupidity. In later sessions Vesna expanded the discourse about networks to include nanotechnology, and Ascott added the aspect of shamanic practices. François Soulages’s contribution on the subconscious was, it seems (I was unable to attend), another highlight of the day. There were also a few small exhibitions in front of the lecture hall. The exhibition on the history of artmedia and aesthetics of communication showed numerous interesting historical documents and, to an artmedianewcomer like me, communicated a sense for the continuity in the ongoing discourse since 1985. There was also access to an on-line exhibition with works selected by invited curators and symposium participants, but it was basically impossible to find time to look at it. (It is to be hoped that this exhibition will be made accessible on-line.) The conference was free and attracted a loyal, mostly French, audience over the 3-day “marathon.” Even on the fourth morning, Monday, a reasonable crowd showed up for the final discussion. This was held in French and no translation into English was provided; therefore, I attended it only for an hour and then left, exhausted from the French philosophical lingo and without knowing if any concluding statements or important questions for the ongoing discourse were elaborated. All in all there were only a few surprises at the conference. One reason could be that there was no call for contribution; the organizers chose the speakers directly. The schedule was very tight—too many speakers, too little time for questions, too short lunch breaks. Nonetheless the program and conference format allowed networking and discussions in many of the restaurants of Paris—especially after walking through streets illuminated by most wonderful Christmas decorations.

Hans Danuser: Frost Photographs by Hans Danuser. Text by Urs Stahel. Scalo, Zurich, Switzerland, 2001. 120 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 3-08247-54-3.

colleague of long standing, points to the timely relevance of Rywert’s writings, as they oppose the major issues with which architects struggle today: issues that oscillate between productive pragmatism and, due to the impoverished teachings of functionalism, the acceptance of a purely decorative role for art. This collection of essays on the changing relations of body and architecture are a proper homage to Rykwert’s legacy as they continue to articulate this challenge.