The Question
Academic research on Twitter has been rife since it hit off in 2006, with significant focus on two topics in particular- that of privacy and identity. Much that has been written by scholars of Twitter has generally been cautious, negative (labeling privacy as a problem) or positive in the sense of data accumulation (i.e what can be inferred…
(A blogpost on Florian Cramer’s presentation, originally published @ Video Vortex #6 website. The original text can be found here )
Florian Cramer (media theorist, director of the Piet Zwart Institute) participated in the first day of Video Vortex to provide the audience with an insightful overview of the Bokeh Porn concept. In his presentation he
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Originally published on the Video Vortex #6 conference blog
German filmmaker, media artist and activist Florian Schneider ambitiously set out to present a mission statement for a novel type of documentary, the open source mode, and launched into a highly theoretical and somewhat cryptic talk that contained a few guidelines on how this transition can be made, but lacked any clear examples or results.
In The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006, MIT Press), (the late) Anne Friedberg traces the history of the relationship between the window and the human experience, from the physical to metaphorical. She draws analogies between the figure of the framed window and the metaphysical framing of experience to provide an historical exegesis detailing the developments of (primarily Western) spectatorial experience in relation to how our perceptions of the world are structured.
The definition by Card et. al. of information visualization as “the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition (1999),” is the basis for many. But there are also parties involved from outside the academic fields in the popularization of information visualization, as Viégas and Wattenberg write. Tag clouds for example go against certain theoretical design principles but still seem to work. Lima praises the way “they observed how the last couple of years have witnessed the tipping point of a field that used to be locked away in its academic vault, far from the public eye. The recent outburst of interest for information visualization caused a huge number of people to join in, particularly from the design and art community (2009),” resulting in the development of a multiplicity of projects.
In his latest book: Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape (2009) Lucas Hilderbrand explores the analog past of video nostalgically, and shows its importance and relevance to (new) media studies. Hilderbrand mainly focuses on the aesthetic, cultural and legal impact of the analog videotape era to create a refreshing view of the analog past’s heritage to the digital age.
The…