Ethno-blogger - a term coined by Goran Batic and Nancy Mauro-Flude from the Institute of Network Culture in Amsterdam. Ethno-blogging is an activity that occurs at conferences, events, performances or other various circumstances of public gatherings. 'Ethno-blogging' is live observation and realtime publishing to the web. As it is commonly known the goal of ethnography is to combine the view of an insider with that of an outsider to describe a social setting. The result is expected to be deeper and fuller than that of the ordinary outsider, and broader and less culture-bound than that of the ordinary insider.

Simultaneously blogging is an action of gathering data, in order to make transparent social interactions, it is usually the case that it is not necessarily a sophisticated cultural analysis tool, while ethnographers do use their interactions with informants to discover and create analytical frameworks for understanding and portraying that which is under study. The procedures used in this direct and intimate acquaintance with the emphemeraly and empirical world provide assurance that the data collected are grounded in informants' actual experiences and uploaded live onto the web, hence the term 'Ethno-blogger'.

Thank you all!

Nancy and Goran

Wrapping up the conference, the guests had a final chance to address the speakers with various questions and this was a mutual enquiry. All of the speakers were seated at one place below the "A decade of webdesign" logo.

These are the issues that characterized the final discussion:

Geert Lovink Mobile devises are editors!

Q. “As it was said earlier today, many design students believe that they will get famous and reach soon after they graduate. How do we make them realize that is not the case? “
• John Chris Jones: “This has always been the key question. There are artists who made a great deal of money, where as others did not. It will always remain the same.”

Q. “Why aren’t there more software programmes to help visually impaired disabled people?”
• Helen Petrie: “They are very expensive, and hard to use. Definitely more effort needs to be put in order to make sure that the web is usable for everyone!”

Q. “Self expression – a special way of being human. I want to be human, but not a copy? Notions of freedom, and expression have been come very bounded up with each other. The connection of freedom and self-expressions was the key term of this conference. How do you feel about that notion?”
• Danny O’Brian: ”You construct, and anonymously contribute to the artistic works, there are vast amount of home pages where people share code.”
• John Chris Jones: “John Cage did not advocate self-expression - he recommended that we let go of our likes and dislikes and wake up to how wonderful the world is once we put our preferences aside... One can lose oneself when discovering or doing something and that is not the same as self-expression...
...to say that self-expression is yuk is a ghastly remark that i regret - i would prefer now to quote what Edwin Schlossberg once wrote in a letter to me:
we are self/other or we are nothing
...and to proceed, in the light of these remarks about freedom, etc. (by several Americans) ready to abandon or modify the idea of self-expression when it comes to sharing, as the internet allows us to, the 'good' powers that are still supposed to be limited to 'creative people' and professions..."
http://www.softopia.demon.co.uk/2.2/webdesign.html

• Michael Indergaard: “I want to stress that culture of individualism is framed under self-expression.”
Q. “What urban infrastructures are we talking about, what’s the role of new media workers? Is it to overlay another layers in a post crash era? In the intersection of technology, urban design and real estate, there are clear dangers in metropolitan centres regarding property booms; workers can't affort to live in the cities. What is the role of new media workers? To sex up the city, feed a property boom? What we need is a cultural council, create branches of govenment inparticular sectors.
• Michael Indergaard: “What the role is going to be? That was my question. That’s one of the emerging questions of new media. Who was going to be controlling and how was that done? The role, we should talk about what‘s idealistically going to be, and what’s most probably going to be. I have no simple optimism about that. They’ll have to act through institutions. Institutional representatives of new media will need to be involved in the politics and policies of new media.”
• Peter Lunenfeld: “This is just emerging at the moment. Intel labs etc are involved in this. I have been thinking that one of the things we need to be aware of is that the web is thought of as a desktop object. You see a transition where some people are looking at it as a mobile object. Messy details of protocol".

Q. “What’s the next dream that will keep us on going? Right now we are out of the ideas what the future should look like. We are all into the past.”
• Max Bruinsma (design theorist): “If there is an inviting prospective, it is web designers at the first place should shift their attention from the screens to what’s happening behind it. Determining the structure is done by the technicians. Structure needs to have bigger focus. Designers can play a very big role there. They can think in terms of what it communicates, what it means. That’s the most utopian perspective for me.”
• Geke van Dijk: “I see your theory, but it’s not fair, it’s extra reality, since many designers are ahead of that for years.”

Q. “I would like say that we should have quality design software, we should have a scale, just like we have scales for other software. Quality models such as ISO. Are they applicable to design or not?”
• Danny O’Brien: “I was listening to a researcher who investigated that software quality is an invented term. We need to learn how to be engineers. There is artistic approach to the engineers’ works.”
• Helen Petrie: “There are no good standards for the interface standard quality. An interface for the American police took 45 min to log a crime, where as it took less time on paper. We don’t have standards.”
• John Chris Jones: “I like the idea of standardization but I am sceptical about it.”

Q. “This questions concerns usability. How do we tell our managers that we need a usability expert?”
• Geke van Dijk: “It would be surprising at this moment that people who design sites are not informed about the usability and accessibility. There should be awareness. I am not going to say that this rule of usability applies to every situation.”

Q. “The current focus is on the web, computers and mobile devices. All these devices have a limited input structure. I think when I look at the web, it is well capable to get out of the computer, and go out… The focus should be on developing new interfaces. What could be the next stage?”
• Helen Petrie: “Accessibility should be the first one and the usability the next one. It’s still a shaky ground. Disabled people are willing to try anything new, so we should learn something from them. I can’t believe we are still using the keyboards!”
• John Chris Jones: “If you look at history people who make new things are surprised when the innovations go so deep into the society. The cell phones were for elite people, but now they're all over the place.”

Q. “Media Art uses different things with the Web, different surroundings and interactive. I think media is going into the public space. Web design after 10 years has a social responsibility, web to democracy, we need transparency, to know whom you are dealing with. People put their info everywhere, and they have no idea where is goes to!.”
• Max Bruinsma: “Nielson Jakob said a year after the net was created that we needed rules.”

Q. “How do we make sure we don’t loose everything? And what about the notion of original? How do you track where things started?
• Franziska Nori: “I am not able to give an institutional answer, but you can not store everything. The question is about writing history and about people writing history. We are all entitled to contribute. History is writing itself, it’s just we are not able to evaluate it. We need at least 5 yrs, and see what’s left of the relevant issue. We are all aware that in the digital world, everything is retrievable. Arts has already proved that original is important, but originals need to be redefined. Under the economical terms, the original is not such an issue any more. However it is a very interesting question."

Q. “When you talked about changing interfaces – I think bomb exploded in my head. You said to model the user is the first thing, but isn’t he modelled already? This particular issue of changing interface being confusing is a characteristic to older generations. Younger generations move to Linux since you can make interfaces of your own. It is very important for systems to offer personalization of the interface. It is important for people to be able to change interfaces to their taste. When interfaces changes, it is either time to stop what you are doing, or start training yourself on the daily basis! People who do design have to be educated, since they need to learn all the time. If they are not willing to learn, they shouldn’t be doing design. I have got several expensive books on some software, but they are useless now, since they changed so much. I think people who make interface should allow users to change them.

Authenticity plays a much important role than the original, up to a certin extent. Single originals needs to be redefined, and appreciated there is of course relevance on cultural terms.

I was surprised about the intellegent people that are on the web but then I realised it's obvious, if you dont want to learn then you are not in there!"

A group of Olia Lialina's students from Stuttgart is presenting the Web colours, and the specific way they have changed and developed in the past decade.

Peter Luining's has been making autonomous work on the net since 1996. At first doing net based installations. In these minimal web-based abstracted experiences, he works intuitively with interactivity of the net and flash grid based sequencers. He remixes the code of the filter, vector pixels via vector graphics, plug ins, source codes, browser page translated into tones and visuals.

In October 1998 macromedia gave away the definition of FLASH in response to competitive formats, allowing a watershed for all kinds of small flash programmes to come on the market and flourish.

Peter gave some great examples of interesting flash animations of the web and demonstrated a bit of flash hacking.

Geke researches in the field of commercial web design. In her presentation she looks back at the past 10 years to realize what has past.
Aim: To understand where we are now and where are we going to be soon.

She defines the decade as a pond, where each thrown stone made a difference and contributed to the web as the whole.

Technology period (1995) – sites were feature driven, and programmers were opinion leaders. web design as a profession didn’t exist as yet. Users were interested in technology, and the user research was minimal. Users had to adopt to the technology.

Usability period (1998) – sites were still techonology driven but with changes. They were visually attractive and usable. Web design began to be acknowledged as a profession. The audience got wider, and designers were opinion leaders. There was awareness of necessity of creative design. User research was visible, and importance was give to the guidance through the site.

User experience period (2001) – it was about the user’s experience. The ultimate goal was to create pleasure for users, and the element of fun was assigned to the web. Good design meant it had many hits online. Design matured into several specialisms (audio, functional etc). Marketers were the opinion leaders, and the user research became a profession. At this period, online panels were introduced.

User value period (2004) – it is still very much in progress, and the focus is on the balance btw technology and people. Sites are being chosen more strategically, meaning it is more about what the site is for. By now, general audience is online, and the power consumers are opinion leaders (‘spread the word’ method).

Web is integrated in our daily lives, day-to-day reality. The users of the web are very active and sophisticated, but they are also unpredictable and erratic. Statistics tell us that people use the web to do research, not so much for shopping. That doesn’t depend on the design, but on the mood. It is messy and very dynamic, and we shouldn’t over focus that designers can force anyone to use sites due to good design. Users will always move in and out.

Helen Petrie's presentation stresses to us how access to information for disabled people is really poor- reminding us that they want to do the weird things on the web too!

Web-sites are considered a service so you might be even liable under the law in some cases if your web-site is not accessible. Regarding the history in accessibility - before the web you could take ascii string and convert it into synthetic speech dos, with unix, ascii text based command line systems.

In 1995 the first major screen reader for windows based on speech was called 'JAWS' which still has 80% of market in screen reading software.

What is an accessible web-site? What do people have to do to make it accessible for people with print disabilities or image disabilities? First of all starry back grounds are hopeless for visually impaired! (they don't have to be bland, vanillia or text only) put in skip navigation link, use mark-up for lists, headers and paragraphs, DESCRIBE the images! Visually impaired people want to learn about colours and distance, what is the image doing.

Provide meaningful, distinct links and good organisation of pages and sites
Get disabled people involved in testing your web-site, go and do this on the web-site and see what happens, then you will learn what a good user experience and an understandable web site for a print disabled person is.

In order to tackle design accessibility for users, we need a repository for excellent accessible web-design and more designers to be involved with this research.

www.bentoweb.org/surveys
BenToWeb is a project within the Web Accessibility Benchmarking (WAB) Cluster aimed to support the European public and private sector to implement the recommendations of the eEurope 2005 Action Plan by providing new software modules and methodologies that satisfy some of the accessibility recommendations of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which are not analysed by existing tools due to their inherent complexity.

This discussion expressed the need to transform the social imagination that includes a realistic view of oppression and discrimination against women, work-place struggles and the struggle for self-determination.

How do we give visibility to projects that valorise the creative, relational and affective side of labour and different paths of liberation with and through technologies that are not a utopian lie about the human condition?

Too many people are ardently wedded to a myth of themselves, their aspirations are inside a closed feedback loop. Web-design students think that they will be rich and famous in 7 years! 'Fame' is an interesting area that is changing at the moment because of new media. The hype of self exploitation is vivid and the utopia of becoming eventually what we hope for is a lie.

There is an elimination of certain discourses, where there are many parallels with the art world and also with conventional old media e/g. patterns of deregulation, work contracted out and lots of freelance workers.

In regard to racial and gender issues there is general blindness, many women are using pregnancy as excuse to stop working. How can we see the reality of this? An example could be to show alternatives to corporate production such as networks of collective and shared production of knowledge and information, forms of organisation inspired by the free/open source-software model, co-operative and creative work that demand basic social income.

Lovely ladies from the bar...

...serving lovely lunch snacks.

Computer levitation ?

One of his projects “Everyone hates attachments” is a complaint site! Dot com crush was a huge emailing time for NTK.

He introduces the notion of Principia Discordia, explaining the people who created the first Macintosh were discordians.

1994 – an explosion of self expression. If you were tall and interested in design and self expression, you would be unemployed and you would be working on a small media project.

They were very used to the idea of self expression and not being moderated by anyone. The appeal of web solved the problem of distribution, a freedom to advertise your artistic works to the whole world.

First entries were the most important thing in 1994. All first website were done during the stolen time of their work time. While being on a site, you didn’t know whether it was done by one employee or by a big corporation. Hotwires was one of the first professionally designed sites.

As examples of first entries, Danny O'Brien presents two sites:

Suck.com was a site done by ppl who worked at hotwires and thought it sucked. The suck guys became heros! Stole the time of hotwires to create the site where they could trash hotwires.

Fucked company became a business since it had so many hits. The irony of the guy doing his project is that all companies are fucked. The job that leaves you alone with the technology, you spend hours there, but just a small fraction of time was used to do the work in the company.

A world less riddled by the domination's of class, race, gender, colonialism and sexuality, Rosalind Gill exposes the myth of new media workers, by discussing the new forms of politics, conflict and innovations in social communications.

To confront the crucial transformations occurring in life and work within the contemporary information economy she tells the stories and results of studies about socially precarious workers, flex-workers, autonomous and atypical worker conflicts. Ungodly hours and night shifts - which previously only involved a small percentage of the workforce - has now expanded and increased. New media workers have a clear role in social production, but don't yet have representation of it's collective needs - needs of social aggregation, access to standards of sociability, housing, union and bargaining rights all around the table.

Via Gill's empirical research we learn how it is to work in new media, we enter a landscape of precarious labour and the related social struggles over the last ten years : part-timers struggles throughout the world, analysis of labour exploitation, call-centres, the commercial chains, the web-economy, information sector and media-entertainment.

There is a serious digital divide in regard to access to information and media infrastructure - namley due to class, race and gender blindess.

The Post Feminist Issue regards the serious concern for woman, labour and communication and the cultural, political and social implications of technologies on gender and identity. Many woman today are working in the field of visual production and communication. We are used to seeing images of women on advertising bill-boards: women on the beach with cameras, relaxed and happy while they film themselves. Often they lie back in a bikini with a computer in their hands. But the reality is very different, Women are again tied to the home, often exploited, paid less than men for the same job, exposed to work without a contract, in jobs like help-desks without any valorization of their real technological knowledge.

Michael Indergaard talks about Silicon Alley, the impact of media on economy, and the current state of the ideal alley.

He introduces networks that web workers belong to, and asks where is the power there? How much control do they have? Do they have any?

He also raises the issue that the Internet raised New Media in New York. The notion that new media producers can produce more creative and authentic works.

An example of a person who made it in New York new media area is Kyle Shanon. He formed Urban Desires webzine and associations as well.

Silicon Alley – where did the commercial entity come from? From the add and commerce, with the media as well, as well specialized local newspaper (Silicon Alley reporter)

Capitalists didn’t only explore the networks, they were creating them! Seeing themselves as cultural gurus as this picture clearly illustrates.

The impact of networks and media for Silicon Alley can be seen from the fact that the amount of money made in New York Internet in 2000 is equal to what the USA made in 1995!

Michael Indergaard concludes that the impact of 9/11 was too big. Investments were rare and many companies went bankrupt. Silicon Alley died as a social entity. However, there is the idea of re-building the valley, a project worth 5 billion dollars.

The consequence: New Media is used very interactively in NY, in order to create urban areas as a field for imaginative expressions and aesthetics.

The day two is about to start and the first guests are here. Today's topics are Digital Work and Modeling the User.

There is an annoucement about The Precair Forum www.precairforum.nl
12th February in Amsterdam that is very much related to the impending issues surrounding the topics today. This forum focuses upon 'the rise of a knowledge-based economy based on immaterial production (of information and services etc) and flexible labour'.

Steven Pemberton, Angela Beesley, Schoenerwissen/OfCD

Discussion about semantic values in the wake of wikipedia, because of the complexity in dealing with multiple agreement. Possible structures and techniques for mapping among multiple representations.

Do we not live in a multiplicity? By which there cannot not be a singular answer to any question, especially truth. Any issue over the correctness of any position, especially in language and meaning must rest on the notion that one truth is correct.

However, given multiplicity and multi-racial acceptance then the notion of one idea being correct must be set aside.

"So - if the meaning that appears in the tenuity is real, it can be traced back to its source which is real - or real enough for our present purposes - and this tracing-back is called (by the Ismaili gnostics) ta'wil, or "Interpretation." The two-dimensionality of duelling epistemologies, dichotomies, semantic traps, bad faiths - fuck science and religion - we should demand a rationalism of the marvellous - an end to the violence of the explanation."

'For and Against Interpretation' Hakim Bey and Ontological Anarchy: The Writings of Hakim Bey

They presented a selection of most remarkable websites of the last 10 years of Webdesign.

In their view designer’s aim is to design processes not anything physical. They claim that visual design should mediate the technology.

Certain sites throughout the past 10 years have introduced characters, and they became the web characters. That is very characteristic of Japanese web design.

Future directions:

- Visual design is no longer the one. Designers should focus on structure,
- Blogger – over short time frame, it is the biggest blogging portal!
- RSS – a new technique
- Soon to be out Apple’s Dashboard for mini applications

According to Steven Pemberton “Ineluctable modality of the visible” is what dominates our experience in design.

The reason: the web is treated as a new visual space, and it wasn’t supposed to be like that. It will change. Its purpose was for the meaning.

Looking at pages now, it is a mess. It is hard to get the meaning out it them. HTML and Style Sheets are old but good!

Your most important user is blind! Half of the hits come from Google, and Google sees what blind users see.

He raises the question of who should be designing websites. Programmers are not supposed design, since their psychology is different than ours. Graphic designer should not design websites. Their psychology is different than most of the population.

What are the 4 most important features of websites?
1. Good content
2. Usability
3. Fast download
4. Regularly updated

His view of the future is the end of pixel perfect page, and the beginning of the visual semantic and proper fluid design.

More explicit is semantic!

Nadia Palliser teacher in Media Theory & Josephine Bosma media theoretician and former Radio Patapoe [PTP] radionaut.

Angela Beesley from the Wikimedia Foundation the 'slayers of the dragon that is encyclopaedia Britannia' according to moderator Richard Rogers.

Wikipedia is an inspiring model of a creative international community and an invaluable public resource; it gives voices to many who would not have them otherwise - it is a great tool for encouraging and celebrating diversity. The more one engages with and discusses the constrained forms, functions, bonds, hierarchical institutions and organised transcendence that have limited language, the more one can map strategies to mobilise these cultural patterns which shape and limit our materiality.

The content on wikipedia is freely licensed re-usable, people can take it and modify it. Its core policy is a neutral point of view. The software stores every version of page in its archive. The function of the software design, is that it has a watch list which can block users, and ip addresses - if there is obvious vandalism.

In an organic process developers create the framework as users format the site, where dynamic information, open feedback and open communication models are at play. Each wikipedia language site is unique because of its contributions 'user created skins'.

Even hieroglyphics, the speech before words, can be added! ~ Derrida & Artaud's dream is almost a reality. Derrida, implicitly referred to a sacred conventionalised pictographic system, 'The word is the cadaver of psychic speech, and along with the language of life itself "the speech before words" must be found again. Gesture and speech have not yet been separated by the logic of representation'

John Chris Jones, Olia Lialina, Hayo Wagenaar

They all agree that there are sites that need to be saved together with tools!

Design became a facilitator. If you look at skills of any person who has the professional skills, there is a rational part (you can put it in a book) and the intuitive part as well. You get to know how to design with practice. Everyone has a skill, and it is encouraged by practise.

John Chris Jones comments on the collaboration in design between an artist and an engineer; half the time they misunderstand each other and the other half time they discover they have misunderstood each other, and they become hostile.

Olia Lialina states that blogs do not professionalize amateur design, they just regulate it. People deliver unexpected paths to each other and this is a good development.

"We have to think of amateur design as the powerful past."

She analyses some features of old design.

Under construction – such a common sign of the previous (last century) design. Permanent construction is a quality of professional design.

Is the construction actual today? Yes.

Starry night – the most common background of amateur design. It is sort of a metaphor for science fiction, since the web at its beginning was seen as a new dimension, new future. Even if the starry night motif is done in Flash, it still looks amateur.

Olia concludes that if you were to redesign a page from the 90’s, the first thing to do would be to remove the StyleSheet from the background.

To prefer expression over structure is a characteristic of the old web!

William Wordsworth dispersed with computer thought, reading from his digital diary, John Chris Jones is a perfect example of a man who thinks for himself and is able to project into the room, and our minds a series of marvellous reveries about the rearranging of life and nature via technology. "All design and all products are protheses", reminding us about its magical properties, he questions the mechanical seriousness that comes with the replacing human effort. 'What has happened to our spirits? What are we doing working when we should be at play!', Technological networks are embedded in a social spaces.

The social network and technological becomes seamless, there is not a separation. In the complete world, not this imagined world divided into convenient categories by thought, there can be no absolute divisions, either between life and death, thing and spirit, or anything else. Chris Jones lobbies that the 'highly skilled in narrow band jobs - take back from what remains of creativeness and initiative that was long ago lost to them'. We must find and make salient this very aspect of 'ancient' magical intelligence of technology, because technology, is about mediating new (and former) ways of being in the world, new ways to be human, we are given the opportunity to perceive/receive new ways of being, than the limited and prescribed roles that are often dominant in the metropolis.

'When you name something you destroy it, most names are diminishment's of what we are capable of', everybody wants to market things and say, 'What is it?' But Chris Jones is saying it's only interesting when you don't know what it is. If we can tell exactly what the future of web-design is, then he would think it's dead.

http://www.softopia.demon.co.uk/2.2/webdesign.html

Hayo Wagenaar asks what we think about amateur web design, and is it about improving the web or something else.

IJsfontein (Amsterdam based interactive design company) sees future design as an extension of human capacity and human communication. According to him, computers will replace some notions of human processes.

Their products develop children’s mental abilities. He claims interactivity teaches kids to work together. Imagination is no longer restricted by anything.

3 basic activities they focus on: playing, learning and exploring.

Design is about human needs, and it requires people to be engaged. Design is here to improve life, and we need to engage kids.
Design is too important to leave to designers!

John Van Lincon Mathematics teacher attending conference. Interested in the future development of the internet. He uses Applets from the internet for Mathematics.

A story of influential images on the web. Especially this image for Guiness!

Adrian Mackenzie, Franziska Nori and Peter Lunenfeld during the panel I

The key issue in this panel circulated around the question "what advice would you give to people archiving their own work on the web?"
Often we think about making the work accessible at the time in terms of technical issues when we produce something but now there needs to be some consideration for its longevity. For example, art work on CD-ROMs are now becoming obsolete as artists as systems are being upgraded, the art work is no longer able to be viewed.

Franziska Nori predicts that within 3 years there will be a total shift in user functionality and the change over time need to be considered when archiving for long term historical things and museums.

Adrian Mackenzie asks us to imagine the web 10 years beyond in regard to emergent theory, objects and materiality, how, "new media infrastructural objects such as databases, protocols, image codings and frameworks can be read as collectively embodied imaginings". Viewing the web as an enormous piece of software, today he talks about Java a web programming language, a localised construction of the web where in 1996 announced as a way of animating webpages. By addressing the social relations and how they relate to code.

Especially he sees Java as a site of ambivilant relationality that allows code to move, rather than seeing code as a purely formal presence uncontaminated by sociality. With code we should leave open the possibilities and situate it between the network of intersecting structures and processes. It's usually the case that the point of code is to elaborate a way of not determining too much in advance who or what will be in relation to it. By considering organisation and complex environments we acknowledge the lumpy unreadable texture of the code, the intermittent and shifting position of sociality, embodiment in relation to code.

Web-site interactions and relationality is multi dimentional, embodied experience of this is a shifting locus of perception and resistance via a body schemata. We can also transform code into a tool, ignore its relationship to sociality, subordinate its signals to our conscious ends, or constitute an intersubjective process. Then any ability to act rests on a further tacit assumption, namely a primary sociality which has not been generated by conscious intentionality but has preceded such, in other words, a structure of common action which initially consists solely of our interaction with other bodies and code.

Franziska Nori talks about why and how can we collect information that is transitory – what should we collect and how to relate software and hardware? How should these be exhibited to the museum public?

The aim is to archive digital works, in order to preserve them when certain sites cease to exist. This is vital in order not to loose the history and the cultural products of the digital age.

By archiving digital objects, we will enter the digital dark ages. National politics should react. How to resource non-object oriented works? Perhaps museums should exist as a contact repository a cultural archive for distributed knowledge systems.

Problems: The pace in which the technology goes is enormous. Programming languages make the accessibility a challenge. If data is store on CDs, the durability is 5-7 years!

The fashion to exhibit and preserve new media works has started rather recently. Video works archiving goes back to only 30 yrs ago.

For instance after at least 10 years of web-design 'Time Zones' is the first major exhibition at Tate Modern devoted exclusively to film and video, 6 October 2004 – 2 January 2005.

Even more alarming in the Australia Council have proposed a restructure
including disbanding of the New Media Arts Board - The digital dark ages indeed.

Peter Lunenfeld talks about how the 90's web-designer was initially viewed like a punk-rocker, during the .com boom "the wild and wacky web-designer changing the world". Raising questions about the general lack of ability to go further than the initial excitement about the technology, is an issue that is seriously addressed. To be fully aware of the current problems of one's tools and languages, to be convinced of their extreme importance, and desirous of solving them from within.

Femke introduces the idea of Timeline Hot Spots, the conference part where everyone has a chance to present their view on web design.

Introduction by Geert Lovink, talks of the discourse around web-design "We Work Here, But We're Cool". In this conference we are going to question the 'aura' surrounding web-design.

What's Cool?- the ethos of information, information as style, the feeling of information. Geert informs the audience that if anyone has any theoretical questions about cyber-politics and bad attitude, feel free to ask him or Mathew Fuller during the next days!

The audience is ready for 'the show'.

The first guests are coming in.

Networks are ephemeral, often precarious and unstable. Cal does his best to hack around the space in order to give us connectivity for the conference. The ethno-bloggers Nancy Mauro-Flude and Goran Batic need a stable connection for their mission, to document the events of the day 'real time'.

The arrival of the speakers and the guests is expected in an hour.