Skidmore's Zankel Lecture to Bring Audience into the "Digital City"

Those attending this year's Zankel Lecture in Business Administration at Skidmore College can check their customary lecture etiquette at the door. Audience members are encouraged to bring their cell phones, PDAs, and wifi-enabled laptopsand to be ready to use them.

Entitled "Where are You? Time, Space, and Place in the New Digital City," the lecture/demonstration will explore our evolving sense of space in a world of ubiquitous digital communication. The event, open to the public free of charge, will take place at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 18, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

Presenters Barbara Crow, Jason Lewis, and Michael Longford will invite the audience to experience the "digital city"the concept of shared public space that is being transformed by a host of mobile technologies, from cell phones and PDAs to iPods, GPS, and wifi-by participating in Cityspeak, a "digital graffiti" project they have pioneered in Montreal in partnership with Canada's Mobile Digital Commons Network.

Cityspeak explores the use of communication technologies we think of as private to create transient public displays. Participants transmit text to a common server, where it is processed in real-time for animated public display as a sort of collective billboard.

This kind of project furthers "our understanding of the intersection of art, technology, and science," says Pushkala Prasad, Skidmore's Zankel Professor of Management for Liberal Arts Students, noting that an interdisciplinary approach is a criterion for the annual lecture.

By participating in Cityspeak as a mini-community, says Prasad, audience members will be prodded to think about "how these technologies are transforming our sense of time and space in the city." Their participation will become part of the three presenters' ongoing research.

The work raises interesting questions for Prasad. "It's intriguing the way people connect with like-minded people without having to get together in one spot," she says, pointing to broad implications for this kind of collaboration in politics and business, among artists, and in civic groups. She confesses she is ambivalent about increasing digital communication at the expense of face-to-face human interaction, a concern the speakers will no doubt explore. "They're quite provocative," she says.

Barbara Crow is an associate professor and director of the graduate program in communication and culture at York University, Toronto. Her research projects include the study of digital cities. Jason Lewis, graduate program director and assistant professor at the Department of Computation Arts, Concordia University, Montreal, studies the history of visual language and novel computer applications for interactive and text and typography. Michael Longford, whose creative work and research explore the interconnections among photography, graphic design, and new media, is co-principal investigator for the Mobil Digital Commons Network.

The setup will include two projection systems, one to run the speakers' presentation and the other to instantly display messages from the audience. The presenters will bring their own computer equipment and a wireless modem to receive messages via cell phones, PDAs, or computers.

The Zankel Lecture in Business Administration, established at Skidmore in 2001 in honor of the late Skidmore parent and Trustee Emeritus Arthur Zankel, serves as a forum for the discussion of management and business issues from a broad societal and ethical perspective.