Blog cowritten by Sam Gregory, Program Director, WITNESS, and Patricia Zimmermann, professor of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festval, Ithaca College

PART THREE: Towards Provisional Ethical Working Principles of Social Media and Human Rights

Overarching all these questions of ethical responsibility – to the person, to the story, to action - is the change in relationships between the one-on-one negotiation of consent, rights and usage between a documentarian and a subject, a largely binary relationship or series of relationships, on an ethics of an image grounded in a particular relationship to a focus on an ethics of networks, of material circulating, re-combining and being re-used in multiple relationships between people often far distant from the source originators (the filmer, the filmed).

Some provisional principles might include:

• An image uploaded, bluetoothed or shared is an image that can circulate and move and be reshaped, and all ethical assumptions should be based on this.

• Consent - emerging from established human rights practices and traditions of documentary ethics, and social science, and grounded in a recognition of real dangers on the ground - is central, but needs to be re-grounded in new communities of practice such as exist in spaces like YouTube

• Respect for human dignity, emerging from established human rights practices and traditions of documentary ethics and grounded in a culture of empathy, is central.

• Preservation of agency is a balancing act between the storyteller and the remixer, reliant on internalized and externalized context

• Aggregation offers us an alternative to singular emblematic stories or paradigmatic stories that fits preconceived ideas, yet require new frameworks of aggregative ethics and questions about how to generate ‘responsibility to act’

• Ethical engagements will be conditioned by the technological operators of online services, the creators of software and hardware – and their engagement is critical to this project.

We are now in a world of purposeful witnesses, of casual producers, documentary producers and advocacy producers, of governmental, corporate and non-governmental promoters of technology as panacea, of curators and aggregators, of citizen participants in projects of collective voice, and of re-mixers, re-purposeful witnesses and casual sharers of the spreadable and viral.

The question of ethical engagements between all of these sectors for human rights is the challenge we must all enter into, proposing both solutions and questions.

FLEFF international advisory board member, curator and speaker Tim Murray is organizing an international workshop this weekend at Cornell University.

It's not to be missed--cutting edge thinkers and practitioners exploring networks, mobilizations, and spatialization in a series of mind-stretching and utterly engaging workshops and forums. Featured FLEFF installation artist and friend of FLEFF Renate Ferro is on the THINKING NETWORKED PRACTICE panel at the end.

Stay tuned for my reports from the front of digital thinking this weekend---I'll be doing live blogging from inside the workshop. Hope some FLEFFers can join me there...

SOCIETY FOR THE HUMANITIES AT CORNELL HOSTS INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP:

"SPATIALIZED NETWORKS AND ARTISTIC MOBILIZATIONS: A CRITICAL WORKSHOP
ON THOUGHT AND PRACTICE"

OCTOBER 23-24    A. D. WHITE HOUSE, CORNELL UNIVERSITY
ITHACA NEW YORK

In conjunction with the annual research, "Networks/Mobilities," the
Society for the Humanities at Cornell University will be host to an
international workshop on "Spatialized Networks and Artistic
Mobilizations."  Organized by Timothy Murray, Director of the Society
for the Humanities, the Workshop gathers together international
figures in the practice and theory of spatial networks and artistic
mobility. This is the first of a series of 2009-10 public events on
"Networks/Mobilities," that will foster discussion of the flows of
peoples, materials, images, and ideas across physical and virtual
boundaries.  The Workshop opens, Friday, October, 23, at 1:45 in the
A. D. White House.

Friday, October 23, features plenary presentations by architects
Teddy Cruz and Keller Easterling who have fostered international
reflection on the role of spatial networks, capital systems, and
migration patterns in contemporary globalization.  Teddy Cruz,
speaking at 2pm, teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the
University of San Diego where he mixes practice and teaching on
housing design for immigrants in a matrix of communal spaces with
foci on suburban San Diego and Hudson, New York.   Keller Easterling,
speaking at 3pm, teaches in the Architecture Department at Yale
University and is Senior Scholar in Residence at the Society for the
Humanities.  Her research project, "ExtraStateCraft: Hidden
Organisations, Spatial Contagions and Activism," investigates shared
protocols, managerial subroutines and financial instruments as they
produce and program physical space in the global market.  At 4:30,
Easterling and Cruz will be joined in conversation with Dagmar
Richter, Chair of the Department of Architecture.

Saturday October, 24, will feature a 9:15 panel with the Cornell
graduate student HASTAC Fellows, and presentations at 10:00 by
Machiko Kusahara, Department of Media Art, Waseda University, Japan;
11:15 Kevin Hamilton, Department of New Media, University of
Illinois; 1:45 Geert Lovink, Department of New Media, University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands; 2:45 Paul Vanouse, Department of Art,
University of Buffalo; and a 4:00 panel on Thinking Networked
Practice with Timothy Murray, Maria Fernandez, Timothy Campbell,
Renate Ferro, and Prita Meier, all participants in the Society for
the Humanities Fellows Seminar.

For further information, please contact Mary Ahl (mea4@cornell.edu)
or Timothy Murray (tcm1@cornell.edu).

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Society for the Humanities

Spatialized Networks and Artistic Mobilizations:

A Critical Workshop on Thought and Practice.

October 23-24

A .D. White House


Friday, October 23

1:45  Introduction
Tim Murray, Director, Society for the Humanities

2:00
Convener, Milton Curry, Department of Architecture
Teddy Cruz, Department of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
"Adaptive Architecture"

3:00
Convener, Mary Jacobus, Society for the Humanities /CRASSH, Cambridge
University
Keller Easterling, Society for the Humanities / Department of
Architecture, Yale
  Univ.
"Disposition"

4:30-6:00
Conversation: Dagmar Richter, Chair, Department of Architecture
withTeddy Cruz and Keller Easterling

6:00  Public Reception


Saturday, October 24

9:15  HASTAC Networked
Richard Guy, History of Architecture; Claudia Costa Pederson, History
of Art; Seth Perlow, English; Ryan Platt, Theatre Arts

10:00
Convener, Brett de Bary, Department of Asian Studies & Comparative Literature
Machiko Kusahara, Department of Media Art, Waseda University, Japan
" Vanishing Borders - Media Art, Design, and Popular Culture in Japan"

11:15
Convener, Kevin Ernste, Department of Art
Kevin Hamilton, Department of New Media, University of Illinois
"From Legs to Fingers: Relational Mobilities at the Interface"

1:45-2:45
Convener, Phoebe Sengers, Faculty of Information Science and
Department of Science and Technology Studies
Geert Lovink, Department of New Media, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
"Network Cultures"

2:45-3:45
Convener, Stephanie Owens, Department of Art
Paul Vanouse, Department of Art, University of Buffalo
"Active Stimulation Feedback Platform"

4:00   Thinking Networked Practice: A Discussion
Panelists: Timothy Murray (Chair), Timothy Campbell, Maria Fernandez,
Renate Ferro, Prita Meier