Monthly Archives: October 2010

Fail and Prejudice: Using Inkscape as an alternative to Illustrator

Emina Sendijarevic | 31 October 2010, 4:34 pm | tags: , , ,

I was already familiar with Illustrator (CS3). However since it’s been a while ago, I thought I could use Inkscape without prejudice. Wrong. This is a quick illustration I made and as you can see it didn’t work out like I had in mind. The point was to make a head upside down, half filled with blood that was dripping…


Pet animal 2.0: Neopets

Mareline Heijman | 31 October 2010, 3:23 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , , , ,

If blogs are Foucauldian confession than this is mine. I used to play Neopets. Nine years ago I’ve created an account to be recognized in Neopia as “Mareline”. My virtual pets, luckily a user is only allowed to have four of them, consisted of a Mynci, a Shoyru, a Chia and a Quiggle. The yellow froggy Quiggle Semafortje was…


Music and Bits and Startups

Megan Adams | 31 October 2010, 2:10 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Last week I attended the Music and Bits conference, which is the pre-conference for Amsterdam Dance Event. The conference touts itself as “an exploration of music and technology” and by all accounts I would say that was accurate.  Of the five companies who presented throughout the day there emerged two themes:  App dev and marketing (for…


Be afraid of Google?

Mathijs Voordenberg | 31 October 2010, 12:54 pm | tags: , , , ,

A week ago I went to a lecture about The Googlization of the Global street by Siva Vaidhyanathan. The lecture was at “de Balie” and organized by Open. With Googlization Siva mean the process of being processed rendered and represented by Google. And the more we use Google the more Google knows about us.

The main question…


Free For $8

Natalie Dixon | 31 October 2010, 2:18 am | tags: , , , , ,

The New Museum of Art in New York City is currently hosting an exhibition carrying work from 23 artists titled “Free”. The show explores: “how the internet has fundamentally changed our landscape of information and our notion of public space.” Perhaps with a firm tongue-in-cheek approach the only other exhibition running at the museum right now is called “The Last Newspaper”.


Impure: a user-friendly visual programming language from Bestiario

Stefania Bercu | 30 October 2010, 7:01 pm | 3 comments | tags: , , ,

Last week, Barcelona/ Lisboa –based company Bestiario presented the audience of VisWeek 2010 with their latest information visualization programming language, Impure, an initiative to help democratize the Web by presenting Internet citizens with a flexible, easy to use tool to manipulate data and share knowledge.

Impure allows users to engage in creating info visualizations, by working with…


What is in your bag or what have you wore today?

Hanneke Mertens | 30 October 2010, 6:54 pm | tags: , , , ,

A very popular group on Flickr is the “What is in your bag group”, where 10722 photo’s are placed of bags and its content and around 19500 flickr- users are a member of this group. When you are a member of the group you can add your own picture and join discussions with topics that have titles such as: Does anyone not have a Moleskine or an Ipod, or Do I ask too much of bags?


Professional use of e-readers: a whole different e-game

Anouka Slemmer | 30 October 2010, 5:23 pm | 4 comments | tags: , , , , , , ,

Take off your shoes, kick back and relax: cuddling up on the couch with your e-reader. Or forget about the couch and lay before the crackling open fire, maybe with a cup of hot coco like you might have done when you traditionally would read a long-awaited book. And then, let yourself be transported to that other universe the writer…


Facebook: open minded panopticon?

Jorien De Wandeler | 30 October 2010, 3:03 pm | tags: , ,

Something caught my eye this week that seemed so contradictory that I want to share it with you. In the course New Media Theories, and actually in every other new media course, the principles of Michel Foucault are relevant. The idea that a society controls itself because humans do not know if they are being watched or not appeals to…


The console wars, back to the 16bit era

Frank Molenaar | 29 October 2010, 7:10 pm | tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Bits. Eight of them or sixteen meant a world of difference to me when I was a kid. I didn’t know what a bit was and actually I still don’t. I tried looking it up but it’s a very tech savvy story I will never be able to reproduce here myself. But luckily it doesn’t appear to matter anymore since…