Discussing the use and integration of network and communication technology into artistic practice and cultural venues. This panel will address issues relevant to form, practice, production and presentation. The use of streaming media, video conferencing, chat interfaces, interactivity and network infrastructure. 

Malleable aesthetics and scalable content - are we distributing existing forms or inventing new ones? How do traditional models for storytelling and narrative distribute? How are digital technology interfaces affecting new architectures for the presentation and delivery of artistic content? Are traditional venues coping with the development of new artistic forms?

What landscapes are there for exchange and what strategies for realization? How do we collaborate and communicate across cultures? Is there a need to rethink the model of premiere showings and touring product or can outcomes cohesively exist over the extension of time? Content distribution or distributable content - is there a difference?

Computer interfaces, data visualisations and virtual reality applications reflect the popular opinion that human beings are primarily visual creatures.

In this panel we will discuss other approaches to sensory understanding in the digital domain - for example exploring stock data or brain scans or learning and 3D shapes in surgery.
What digital activities could be easier to do through other senses? What other senses are there that we can use in the digital domain? Where are the problems with a purely visual interface? How can we use multisensory interfaces for human information processing?

Does understanding come more from doing than watching?

The focus of the panel is on people and technology, a two-way flowing interaction. The role of the computer has shifted from being a tool to universal media machine. We are now interfacing with cultural data. Culture is now encoded in a digital format. How do we mediate this interface from digital to physical and back again? Because of this interaction loop we are existing both internally and externally to ourselves, operating simultaneously in hard world spaces while permeably embodied in electronically constructed spaces.

We will be asking in this panel whether digital technology allows us to interact fully and express our multi-dimensional selves freely, or does it hinder our expression in it's present form? We will also be looking at the nature of cultural applications. What are our concerns at the borderline of people-machine interfaces and how is it transforming us? Who is actually solving these 'hard problems' in interface design? What are our contributions as digital artists and designers to possible new types of cultural products and socially enabling applications of the future? In this panel we will be analysing and discussing these questions with group and audience contributions to aid a future 'modus operandi' for digital interaction designers and artists.