DAC in Australia

DAC, the premier international digital arts conference, will be in Perth next year with Beap. They have just announced the first stage of acceptances:

The reviewing of the 230 abstracts has now been completed, and many thanks to the reviewers for the enormous task. In a process that turns out to have been highly competitive, 48 abstracts have been invited to be developed for presentation at the conference. This will involve the writing and reviewing of the full paper. All submissions will be notified by e-mail, with a report of the reviewing process. Anyone who submitted who has not received a report by the end of October should contact a.hutchison@curtin.edu.au.

48 abstracts have been invited to be developed and presented, while 31 abstracts were outright rejected due to being Too far off topic, Insufficiently original or Unclear / unconvincing. The rest of the abstracts (150) were rated as “valuable contributions” by the review panel, and were not rejected as such, but the DAC format unfortunately simply does not have room for them. Hopefully, these abstracts will be developed further for future presentation. While the review panel was excited about many papers, it did make the observation that a lot of writers did not seem to understand the art of writing an abstract, and that many seemed to be under-informed by obvious, current reading/theory in their area.

Apart from the outstanding papers we are expecting to develop from this selection process, the conference experience will incorporate visits to all of the major exhibitions in the BEAP festival, networking opportunities, artists talks, and the conference itself will take place directly in the heart of Northbridge, PerthÕs cultural and nightlife centre.

I’m so thrilled to say that my abstract has been accepted! Wohoo! I’m so excited. The paper will outline a schema for how people approach media in the multi-platform landscape. I discuss theories of multi-tasking, ergodics and interactivity (and lots more but I’m not giving it away now!). Of course, my paper needs to be accepted through peer-review before I’m actually in the conference, but this is a great start. Wohoo!