2008 Annual Report for the New Media Caucus
After the second year of my term as President, I am happy to tell you that the New Media Caucus continues grow and prosper. The Dallas meeting of the College Art Association was active and full of exciting ideas and people. The NMC sponsored three well-attended panels : "Not Learning from Net.Art: the Rise of Newer Media" chaired by James Morgan; "art blogging == global.exhibit(local)" chaired by Paul Catanese ; and "The Synthetic Aesthetics of New Media Art" chaired by Carolyn Kane. The last two were co-sponsored by the Dallas Contemporary where the NMC also sponsored a very successful show, “realTime08”, curated by Dean Terry..
Even beyond official NMC events, new media was the theme of six other panels and a fashion show, the Leonardo-organized " Social Fabrics: Art + Media +Interconnectivity" show at the Conference Center. Surprisingly, the new media impact on the conference was probably a little greater what we saw last year in New York.
But we can increase this still further for the upcoming conferences in Los Angeles and Chicago. For LA, the panel topics are already set, but many have new media themes or would want a new media voice on the panel. The deadline for applying for these is May 9. If you want to create your own panel, the deadline is in early September for the Chicago conference that will be 17 months later (a long wait, I know, but it is worth it).
I want to encourage you all to submit paper proposals for the Los Angeles panels (deadline is May 9th), and panel proposals for the 2010 Chicago conference. This is how your voice will be heard.
Our final event in New York was our annual Business Meeting, where we discussed priorities, policy, and elected officers. We heard from the previous years' committees and set up the committees for the coming year.
We now have 380 members, a 10% increase over last year, from 13 different countries. The meeting’s focus was working more closely with SIGGRAPH and ISEA, and continuing our recent successes with exhibitions and panels into 2009.
You can download the minutes here, as taken by Juliet Davis, but want to pull out a few highlights:
First, as I am starting my third and last year of the traditional third year term as president, we elected a President Pro Tem, who will likely take the helm after next year’s meeting in LA. Our unanimous choice was Paul Catanese of San Francisco State University. Congratulations, Paul!
Our hardworking Exhibitions Committee will continue to be chaired by Leslie Raymond of UT, San Antonio,
and will work to set up gallery and screening opportunities for Los Angeles and Chicago. If any of you who
didn't make the Dallas Business meeting want to help with this, please email Leslie at Leslie.Raymond
utsa.edu . You
can also join this committee (by joining its email circle) to watch and listen for a year and then apply what you have
learned from Los Angeles to plans for Chicago. This committee, above all others, can provide great career-enhancing experience
and I urge you to get involved.
We also started, for the first time, a Panel Organizing Committee to help call and jury panels, and to locate venues and manage hosting logistics. This will be co-chaired by myself and Jim Jeffers, our minister of propaganda communications.
Lastly, James Khazar was elected chair of Technology Committee, which makes him our first CIO. The technology committee will rebuild our website with a modular content management system to give us more flexibility for expansion.
As always, if you have any suggestions, questions, or issues that you think the Caucus should get involved in, don't
hesitate to email me at gwyan.rhabytcsueastbay.edu
Gwyan Rhabyt, New Media Caucus President
California State, East Bay
gwyan.rhabytcsueastbay.edu