The Annenberg Dialogues were two-day multidisciplinary workshops held at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication in Los Angeles. They were conceived and orchestrated for the Annenberg Center by Rosanna Albertini. She was also chair for the three conferences.

The Dialogues n.1 and n.2 have become a book entitled Technological Rituals.
The Dialogue n.3 has become this website.


 
Annenberg Dialogue n.1
February 1996
   
Annenberg Dialogue n.2

February 1998
   
Annenberg Dialogue n.3
September 1996
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Technological Rituals
 
We Are Animals and Angels, and Reasonable Machines
 
The Never Done Before: Creating Intellectual Property
Invited Artists
John Dykstra
Pat O'Neill
Sara Roberts
Woody Vasulka

Participants
Wendy Apple
Leo Braudy
David Bunn
Robbert Flick
Glenn Harcourt
Selma R. Holo
David James
Peter Lunenfeld
Nancy Lutkehaus
Michael Renov
Vibeke Sorensen
Marita Sturken
Mitchell Syrop
Mark Edward Thompson
Nancy J. Vickers
Judith E. Vida, M.D.
Jon N. Wagner
Invited Artists
Harry Gamboa Jr.
Tomlinson Holman
Hirokazu Kosaka
Alexis Smith
Vibeke Sorensen

Participants
Dagmar Barnow
Meiling Cheng
Kristy H.A. Kang
Marsha Kinder
Jill L. McNitt-Gray
Alexander Moore
Ulrich Neumann
Christine Panushka
Sara Roberts
Louise Sandhaus
Larry Swanson
Douglas Thomas
James Tobias
Nancy J. Troy
Lorraine Turcotte
Ruth Weisberg
Barry Brian Werger
Bruce E. Zuckerman
Participants / Artists
Michael Arbib
Paulina Borsook
Jerry D. Campbell
Caleb E. Finch
Paul Geller
Nancy Glock
Myron F. Goodman
Barbara Hoffman
Allan Kaprow
Jim Lanahan
Pat Martinez-Miller
Max V.Mathews
Patricia McNees
Susan Meiselas
Larry Mizell
Michael Noll
Jim Shaw
Stuart Spence
Larry Swanson
Toshiko Takenaka
David Wilson
               

  This book contains nine stories about an affair between art and technology: the irresistible attraction of an alien wisdom - an unfamiliar conversation between the artist's body and the machine's - the fleeting quality of human experience, and the artist's attempt to translate it into the fixed quantity of codified intelligence. Technology, whatever the operative system, is a fragment of mind longing for a body.

Our technological devices live on an edge that separates knowledge and superstition. It does not matter how many hands, arms, eyes, or virtual substitutes of our body's functions we have created, they are not always functional. There is no preconceived harmony among senses, feelings, ideas, imagery, wishes. If the Gutenberg era has expired, slowly replaced by an audiovisual universe, and the tools of the makers are changing, new creations must still be the labor of the body in the world. In changing their tools, human beings may be changing the ways they see, hear, and touch, but in the end the new world they explore is the old self.

The nine stories are drawn from two small multidisciplinary conferences that were focused around nine artists who are either inventors of new tools or creators of innovative languages within traditional tools. These conferences were held at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication in 1996 and 1998 under the general title Annenberg Dialogues. Each of the nine sections of this book - one for each artist - include a collaborative text by Rosanna Albertini and the artist, an essay about the artist, and a group of images selected by the artist. The reader is invited into a space where the armor of discipline which usually shapes intellectual life has been replaced by the ancient art of face to-face communication, space of collective thinking from which conclusions are banned. This book is the opposite of the "last word" about art and technology. It is a notebook for polymorphous thinking, an offer of dialogue.

Purchase this book online at
Amazon.com
or
BN.com