DAY 1 - Thursday 17th March 2005:

Introduction by Curator Ruairi Glynn
9:00 - 09:15

ADVERTISING
09:15 - 10:45

Sarah Stokes
One Associates Culture with a Certain Sense of Duty
An educational economy of value, in relation to computer hardware and software has been constructed as requiring skills in addition to the traditional skills of early literacy development. Consumer capitalism relies on the theory of control by the culture industry on the minds and actions of people. Software companies and advertising campaigns are using the future of our chidren to excercise this control.

Liam Hemmens
How Sigmund Freud's Ideas Influence Online Advertising Today
Since the industrial revolution and consumerism began the techniques used by advertisers changed dramatically. These techniques were formed from the views of Sigmund Freud and practised in the American market place by his nephew Edward Bernay's. In 21st Century with the internet being the fastest growing market place in the world are we seeing Sigmund Freud's ideas of sub conscious advertising adopted into this market by corporations and businesses alike?

Charlotte Bown
The Birth of Advertising and the Targeting of Today's Young People
Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, had a hand in the creation of the advertising industry. He targeted people's emotions and used these emotions to sell them products that they did not necessarily need. It's bad enough that adults are subjected to the constant taunts of today's advertising industry but should children be pressured by them too?

Lana Ross
Tough Luxury: The Quality of Asidety Explored
Some undefineds, widely tagged as "best left undefined; everybody knows what it means" = asidety. Luxury revolves around “that special something” - that it’s better despite being comparatively worse. Notion that everything’s made from nothing (not equals)… linked with the other, endeavouring to explore these to define some undefineds… to discover why included this asidatious quality… what that is. Takes soft swavery "luxury", makes it concrete = aim

Martin Watts
Advertising is Childs Play
We, as adults, are used to the constant barrage of targeted advertising but young children however, do not possess the same knowledge and resilience to advertiser's techniques. So is it right, therefore to allow advertising to directly target children?

David Wiltshire
Mobile Advertising: Pocket Billboards or Remote Control?
As mobile convergence kicks into gear, advertisers are paying keen attention to our rapidly developing mobile device culture. If mobile phones continue to take an ever increasing role in our personal lives what are the cultural implications of advertising that seeks to target this potentially vulnerable relationship?

INFORMATION CONTROL
11:00 - 12:30

Rupert Allen
Information Filters
The interface has not only changed computers, but a wide spectrum of modern living. Various cultural interfaces or filters have sprung up in our lives both digital and non-digital. These interfaces may act as filters for consumer capitalism, controlling what the public sees and hears. New technologies and approaches to media are giving greater control back to the individual.

Chris Howard
The Bewildered Herd: The Media’s Power of Thought Control
The effect of the media on the public should not be underestimated. What we see on the news constitutes the basis for the majority of our opinions on world affairs. Therefore, you would expect the media to be a reliable source of information, for the public to formulate their own opinions and views about what what’s going on in the world. In reality however, the role of the media is drastically different to what many assume.

Emma Davenport
Technology Past & Present: The Effect on Education
Industrialisation & technological change has had a significant effect on education. Marx’s positive predictions regarding the potential effects of industrialisation on education and the proletariat have not been realised in reality, illustrated from a relative but opposing viewpoint by Futur Anterieur and Bowles. The issue has a principal place and dominant role within educational institutions today, encouraging comodification of knowledge, endorsing privatisation and corporatisation, whilst nourishing the roots of capitalism.

Luke McGowan
Commercial Network Radio and the Homogenisation of the Airwaves
As commercial networks continue to swallow up local radio, can digital radio and the Internet really provide respite from the insidious homogenisation of the airwaves? A critical assessment of the practices and people dictating our everyday listening experiences and the options available to the 21st century music consumer.

Steven Holt
Internet Culture: Control and Chaos
Chaos exists in the internet because of its decentralized nature and the inability of corporations to exercise absolute control over it. If corporations rely upon control over the consumer to ensure profit then the internet offers the consumer an opportunity to escape from this oppression or even fight against it.

Nikolai Rindedal
Who Cares About the Truth?
Leading digital news broadcasters can state different reports, over the same incident, and still, all can claim to give an account of the truth. Given so many choices, how can spectators relate the concept of truth in news media? Is what we believe is the truth determined by our own experiences, beliefs, and biases, or, is it ideologies influenced to us by culturally elites?

CULTURAL PRODUCTION
13:30 - 14:30

Ben Hanbury
Copyright at the Cost of Culture
An examination of the industry response to the problem of illegal copying. Are the actions justified? Shouldn't creators have a right to get paid? Or are these measures actually going to restrict creativity to a point that it will actually damage the cultural industry? This talk will look for the balance that should be taken whether you are a creator of art, music, film or code.

Chris O'Shea
The Changing Nature of the Digital Art Object
Does a digital artist produce a cultural artefact, or a software interface? Examining the theories of Walter Benjamin, does the
reproducible nature of digital art aid its loss of aura, or can such an aura even exist?

Jeremy Knowles
Art as a Cultural Importance
To be cultured we must have an appreciation and an understanding of art. In the twentieth century art has become more conceptual then ever and has gained a certain taboo. But what affect has this had on are culture? I will aim to explore modern art as a cultural importance thorough a video documentary.

John Mitchell
Exploration of Art as a Commodity
Modern art is based on profit potential rather than expression of free ideas and communication. Whilst there are artists who create art outside the gallery system; notable influential artists subscribe to this system of determined market values.

Break 15mins 14:30 - 15:15

Jamie Stonehill
Computer Games: Interacting with the Culture Industry
Adorno and Horkheimer described the Culture Industry as a force that dictates what is to be consumed by the public. In today's Culture Industry could computer games be going some way to allowing the masses to take back control over what they consume?

Daniel Jennings
Consumerism : The Game
Consumer culture has always existed with the ideal of selling products for a mark up on their original cost by creating an often nonexistent need for said products. Now however, a new form of consumerism has come around, that of the virtual game worlds of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Within this space, which has a paid entry, people earn and spend money on completely nonexistent products, but somehow feel a great need to continue doing so past the point of reason.
Simply, people become addicted to consuming.

Rob Stillwell
The Medium is the Msg
With mobile technologies considered an important part of many people's lives, are we blinkered to the potential negative effects of using phones? It can be argued that they provide an interface for individually catered ideology

Panel Discussion and DATAbrowser Launch: 17:00 onwards

DAY 2 - Friday 18th March 2005:

Introduction
09:00 - 09:15

DIGITAL SOCIETY
09:15 - 11:00

Demetres Rudas
Effects of Globalisation on Culture
Despite the very serious political and economic effects of globalisation, which indeed are of utmost significance to the survival of economies and national state entities, one cannot deny that the most directly experienced form of globalisation, and perhaps the
most obvious to the everyday citizen and most widely felt, is its cultural form.

Kathleen Kundiker
Go West
To develop itself in line with the rest of the world, China has to modernise its economy, industry, and its culture. What they fear most, is that to achieve and realize modernization, they must overthrow their history and cultural tradition and completely follow the example laid down by the West.

Ruairi Glynn
Digital Empires
Capitalism as a system employs cultural mass production to sell us the digital world, to support its own growth and empower its influence and control over the masses. The irony is that the digital technology being proliferated by the capitalist machine has created new systems of production that not just reshape and resist, but undermine and potentially over power cultural structures of influence and control.

Tom Danvers
Das Kobolds: Political Systems in Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Games
The Capitalist system is the prevalent social system in the developed world. Some people feel it is causing serious economical, environmental and social problems. Online societies seem to reflect our own. To what extent can online societies be manipulated to draw parallels with, and highlight problems in, our own society?

Ryan Carson
The Mobile Internet
A presentation exploring the possibilities of the mobile internet and it's surrounding 3G services, querying how these new technologies may become used to shift consumer powers, redeveloping mass, un-policeable ad-hoc networks in the forms of early napster. Could this new technology be mis-used to create a Big Brother-esque situation for society?

Emma Blackburn
Individual Freedom in Mass Society
Our education encourages rational reasoning, our technologies produce logical systems, and our democracy strives for order; yet what of the freedom of the individual inside this society of rules designed for the generic masses? To be truly alive surely is not to conform to a pre- packaged lifestyle but to be spontaneous, instinctive and expressive.

James Bonshor
The Metropolis and Mental Life
Since the dawn of man our existence on this earth has always been challenged by the forces of nature. Constantly evolving to combat the ever changing outside forces that nature delivered. Until now these human developments have been more bodily, now writers and sociologists are claiming that the fight that man has had to persist for this bodily existence has entered its latest transformation, the transformation of the mind. They claim that the reason for this transformation is due to the rise of the metropolis and its culture.

IDENTITY
11:15 - 12:15

Darren McVeigh
Recuperation of Rebellion
Market forces have long since been enlightened to the value of subculture style as a vehicle for selling products. All forms of art, music, fashion, behaviour, and politics produced can be commodified and sold. Have the recuperative powers of the culture industry rendered subculture inert?

Emily Besley
Collecting and Consuming our Identities
The suggestion is that consumption is an integral part of personal and social identity, we can see that through consumption the individual has the ability to forge an identity that he or she wishes to be perceived as, and we can change ourselves by the choices we make through our collection of consumption. Thus we become the curators of our own identities.

Tom Jackson
What Genre is Your Existence?
The cultural boundaries that exist between two groups of people may certainly relate to our music taste, in our generation we will
experience all types of brand culture but the changes we face with manipulate our sense of style and our lives will develop in line with our current genre.

Simon Graham
Disposable identity: The Symbiotic Relationship between Celebrity and the Media
Celebrity has long been a commodity served up for consumption by the mass public. Recently the cult of the celebrity has emerged in an exaggerated form, using the paradigm of disposability as its most defining feature. Why should this be so and is it an inevitable outcome of the relationship between purveyor and user? After all, the media industry, as its only access to commercial viability, is bent on satisfying consumer desires.

Break 15mins 12:30 - 13:30

Helen McCarthy
Mobile Ringtones and Chav Culture
Ringtones exemplify a new mode of consumption in which the object in its physical form has been removed, leaving only sign. Considering the importance placed upon the objects we surround ourselves with as a representation of self, how does this new development affect ‘Chavs’ as a group struggling to define their individuality in the face of ruthless categorisation?

Emlyn Miles
The Culture of Instant Messengers
With the emergence of Internet communication tools and our increasing reliance on Instant Messengers, we are rapidly changing our communications culture. What effects does this culture of interaction through compressed expression have on our natural communication skills and our abilities to interact in real world face-to-face situations?

Paul Skeoch
Undo
How a tool, developed due to the technical structure of digital media and the problems of engaging human users, is building a new type of individual. Can undo be raised to the status of a cultural artifact that is preparing us for a new world of near infinite possibility?

Hannah Parsons
Time as an Abstract Exchange Value
Time, in its ‘simplest’ and most recognised form, is represented by the clock and calendar. Throughout our existence, historical evidence points to past cultures measuring and recording time by means of the sun, moon and stars. Our obsession to organise time into more meaningful, quantifiable slots, stems throughout history and provides us with the ability to allocate specific tasks to the slots, effectively manufacturing time as an abstract value of exchange.

CONSUMERISM
14:30 - 15:30

Simon Phillips
Faith in Consumer Culture
The industrial revolution brought about the introduction of capitalism, and also meant a shift in power from the church to the capitalist. In recent times the church has avoided society's loss of faith by making it readily available through every possible
medium. Looking to theorists such as Marx we must question whether we can draw distinctions between the religion and culture, as Tillich contends "religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion".

Mark Webster
E-Commerce and the Consumer
The internet and the advent of e-commerce has given life to a new breed of consumer, they are more clued up to what they are buying and have more freedom to buy what they like, not what they have been told they should like. The culture industry has had to adapt to these people's needs, and has had to accept that it no longer has the same amount of control over them as it once did.

Adam Holland
Virtual Commodities: From Play to Work
'Virtual Commodities’ are objects that take no physical form yet thousands of people ‘need’ them. Such commodities are shifting the ideology of the MMORPGs, no longer is it about ‘play’ and fun, but about ‘work’ and money.

Richard Hatton
Consumption of the Unfinished
An exploration into the idea of the ‘unfinished’ in consumer society and how unfinished geared systems and products affect the culture industry.

Break 15mins 15:45 - 16:45

Adam Crowe
The iPod: Archetypal Capitalist Machine?
Amongst a proliferation of 'techno-lifestyle' devices, can the 'prosumer' be defined as one who is put to work through the act of consumption itself?

Rioch Fitzpatrick
Musical Fetishism
Capitalist domination enforces standardization on the production of music therefore commodifying the cultural product. The capitalist mode of production conditions regressive listening, people desire popular music, partly because capitalists 'hammer' it into their minds and make it appear desirable. Musical convention has here become utterly formulaic.

Steven Diffey
Britney Spears: ARCHETYPAL CAPITALIST TOOL
With a career encompasses chart-topping records, world-wide advertising campaigns and efforts in acting, her reach extends around a world which embraces her with consumerism. She is a global idol – girls want to be her, guys want to be with her. It is suggested that her image, style, persona is a carefully crafted organism that the culture industry adjusts to fit consumer climates. She is Britney Spears tm. When we buy a Britney product or Britney associated product, what are they buying - music, beverages, clothes or conformity?

Heather Wren
The Plastic Bag: A Symbol of Today’s Consumer Society
The life a plastic bag and how it plays a predominant role in today’s ‘create and dispose’ consumer society. An investigation into the ideologies of consumerism at each stage of the existence of the bag focusing mainly on the relationship between plastic bag and consumer and the associated issues of social status and self identity.

Curator's Closing Statement (Ruairi Glynn)
16:45 -