Emergence and Complexity Project

Outline of the Engagement: Instructions to Students

On Thursday September 21, 2006 class will take place virtually at the Artcamp. It’s all happening at the Great Northern Way Campus, 555 Great Northern Way, starting at 9.30am, running until 7pm. (After 5pm it is a party! But it still counts as class for us!!). Try to make it as individuals and also try to have some group presence at this event.

Class participation will involve posting the fullest outline that you have developed to date about on the Emergence/ Complexity Project WIKI by noon - Thursday September 21, 2006.

You will need to add a Project title to the Group No below and link this to a new page that you create for your Group Project. Remember to put yout individual names, student numbers and emails up (email is optional bearing in mind privacy considerations)

GROUP 1- LibraryDuality

GROUP 2- The Pool

GROUP 3- The Path to Community

GROUP 4- OnlineEnvironment=Height+Decay

GROUP 5- Portable Culture: Personality Connected

At some point after 12 noon, depending on how the programme evolves, Niranjan Rajah and Vicki Moulder will announce the Emergence/ Complexity Project WIKI to ArtCamp participants. Then working in your groups over the next few days, you will try to develop the design of your project and in the open source discursive context of the wiki. You will use the wiki as a mechanism to engage with the ArtCamp community, to get feedback on the scope and possibilities of your project.

Students please note the following -

1) Thoroughly understand the context of the BarCamp as a hybrid of a virtual wiki and a real conference event.

2) Come to understand the New Forms Festival as an art and technology event as well and community so as to engage effectively – For instance you could directly email ArtCamp participants whom you think would have interesting contributions to make to your project.

3) State project goals, methods, technologies and context of your project as clearly as possible. Use references and links to outside information, so that participants form the ArtCamp are able to engage easily with your ideas.

4) Although you are not obliged to be present at the artcamp or attend the festival, it would be beneficial to your group’s if at least one member could engaged with the camp or the wider festival. In this way you can make direct contact with the people and ideas that will surely emerge over the course of this event.

5) The purpose of this WIKI exercise is to enable you to experience the emergence of the wider possibilities latent in your group’s project outline, as the ideas within it are presented in the open source context of the Barcamp.

6) This part of the project will not be graded in it’s on right. It should be used as an opportunity to contextualize and evaluate the design of your project. Success in this ArtCamp engagement will result in a deeper and better evolved project.

7) In developing each of your project WIKI’s please bear in mind that your project should be contextualized within theories and notions of complexity, emergence and adaptive self-organizing systems.