The field of VJ (visual jockey) is an increasingly prominent aspect of live performance, especially in the relatively “quiet” physical performance of electronic music. Clubs such as Winston Kingdom in Amsterdam run commercial Windows based VJ software in undynamic loops resembling a software demo as seen in a store.
Today at FOSDEM in Brussels the Fabricatorz libre design…
Despite years of theorization, a concise definition of what constitutes a medium remains elusive. A practice-based case study in generative typesetting leads to an analytics of becoming that highlights the external dynamics of media. Rather than the referentially recursive McLuhan formalism of “studying media as media” (a position which leads to theories that are inapplicable to the dynamics of the computer metamedium), Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation provides a starting point for raising questions about the on-going processes that shape–and are shaped by–media. The practice-based case study leads to a conclusion that positions FLoSS (Free/Libre/open Source Software) as a potent site of agency that encodes radical potential for collective becoming.
At the recent Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels, I had the lucky pleasure of meeting Jon Phillips, a man with seemingly as many projects in a given moment as he has fingers and toes. Just a few of his notable involvements include: vector graphics application Inkscape, the Open Clipart Library, the innovative web application stack Aiki Framework, the fully-federated Twitter replacement Status.net (which powers identi.ca), and the projects (palm-top computer, video camera, and portable VJ station) being developed at Qi Hardware. All of these projects are free in the ontological imperative sense.
Though I’m following up quite late, I wanted to list highlights of the presentations I attended at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels (about which I’ve blogged before). While I strongly suggest you look at the recorded presentation archive so that you don’t miss any presentations that you might find interesting, I’ll also highlight a few of my…
Tomorrow I will be attending the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels. This conference is both free as in beer and free as in relating to the best projects the free, libre, and open source communities have to offer in the realms of graphic and visual design (including typography). Generative design processes will also be duly discussed and represented.
See…
… Interface and media may be two names for the same thing. From the viewpoint of McLuhan and the concept of re-mediation, media are merely containers that encapsulate other pieces of media. This can be seen as an “onion” model of media. Media themselves are then intrfaces: through the containment concept it becomes the means by which the encapsulated media can be extracted from the layers. Interfaces/media are the point of friction, of agitation between layers.
… Interfaces are an ‘outside’ that possess the ‘inside’, “a fertile nexus” that has its own autonomy and represents an area of choice. …
Perhaps you’ve heard of the new < video > tag in HTML5? The first major new version of HTML since HTML 4 in 1997 (how many Internet years are there in a dog year, anyway?) contains several new tags that allow for embedding of multimedia objects without the need for third-party software such as Adobe Flash or Java. Except, if the future belongs to the proprietary platforms, there will be one necessary piece of third-party code. And it could cost us all another chunk of our freedom.
Bill Gates is to new media as Rupert Murdoch is to old media–an atavistic force of economics, mad gambling, and vector misdirection. And right now he is lobbying hard to remove key provisions regarding open standards and open source from European Union policy proposals and, reportedly, winning.
Today I have the pleasure of presenting you with a short interview with Bruce Sterling. Bruce was kind enough to say “we’ll give it a shot” to an e-mail interview when I cornered him at the bar after the ‘You, Me, and Everyone We Know is a Curator’ symposium where he gave his recent speech. I’ve taken this opportunity to ask him a few questions about, among other things, commons-based peer production, the Internet of Things, the bifurcation of psyches across actual and virtual space, and the extent to which there is hope left for the Internet.
Github, online beginning in 2008, has quickly changed the face of source code hosting. Called “social coding” by participants and commentators alike, the site has propelled the adoption of distributed version control systems (DVCS) in general, and git in particular. One of the key features of DVCS is the way in which all individual nodes in a network…