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