Live in 45 Minutes

BREAKING THE GAME :: THE PANEL :: Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 from 5:00pm to 8:00pm at the Society for Art & Technology in Montreal - Free. The event will be streamed live to the SAT as well as to an online audience.

Workspace Unlimited in collaboration with the Society for Art and Technology will host a public panel looking back at phase one of Breaking the Game, a series of interdisciplinary workshops and online symposium that brought together competing theorists and practitioners to build, debate and reflect on virtual worlds, computer gaming, immersive technologies, and new possibilities for artistic practice and experience. The symposium was conducted exclusively through a variety of telematic technologies: iChat, Skype, virtual walkthroughs, an online forum, and email.

Taking place both online and offline, the workshops opened up the art of game modification to the contingencies of everyday life, where virtual technologies increasingly mediate physical spaces and human movements in very complex and dynamic ways.

Breaking the Game initiators Thomas Soetens, Kora Van den Bulcke and curator Wayne Ashley together with symposium participants Sheldon Brown, Luc Courchesne, and Elizabeth Goodman discuss how, why, and under what conditions their artistic work and research have focused on gaming - as a category of cultural behavior; as allegory; as a series of specific audio/visual and interactive technologies; as an emerging form of machine/human poetics and action. They will consider how their interests in gaming overlap with the increasing computerization of the city and ongoing transformation of the built environment in concert with the proliferation of communication and surveillance technologies. During the event, Brown and Goodman will participate remotely through iChat.

The evening will be divided into two sessions. In the first session we will talk more generally about the format, goals, objectives, and challenges of producing Breaking the Game. In the second phase of the evening we will engage the three symposium participants.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS