The world-renown International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam officially kicks off its 10 day program today, permeating itself across theaters around the city . Perhaps less known but more exciting for the ‘new media crowd’ is IDFA DocLab, a unique division and platform dedicated to showcasing innovation in digital documentary storytelling.
Whether termed ‘new media film projects’,…
Since I can remember I’ve been in love with film, I’ve worked in video stores and watched so many films that I can’t even remember how many I’ve watched. Since a year I’ve been working at one of the oldest and smallest art-house cinemas in Amsterdam: Filmtheater de Uitkijk. This tiny cinema at the Prinsengracht is run by…
According to Metareporter, a student blog for BA-student Media en Culture about new media in newspapers, a lot of articles in Dutch traditional media are about new media subjects. The top 3 tags that are being used are: Twitter, Facebook and social media1. This was exactly a year ago as well when I wrote by BA-thesis. These new media…
Phone hacking dominated British headlines during the summer months this year and the revelations were so detrimental to Murdoch’s empire that he thought it was best to shut down The News of the World – believing it had let down its readers. Whether this was in fact an elaborate ‘brush it under the carpet’ operation we might never know- not…
In his presentation at the Video Vortex #6 conference in Amsterdam, graphic designer and project director Roel Wouters introduced the audience to interactive projects which include dynamic media such as web video and animation to install crowdsourced performances. With his collegues Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey and Edo Paulus he has published the Conditional Design Manifesto, which is based on the work of his collective called Conditional Design and emphasizes the idea of following processes in the digital realm rather than its products.
In his talk on the cultural value of amateur video at the Video Vortex #6 conference in Amsterdam, the author, scholar and artist Michael Strangelove explained how amateur productions will gain greater value due to their potential of challenging the meaning of things, their subvertion of capitalist modes of production and their use by individuals as tools for self-representation of the world. Why does ‘Laughing Baby’, ‘David coming back from the dentist’ or the ‘Star Wars Kid’ make a difference in our lives? And what is it that makes online video different from TV? Dr.Strangelove’s answer to this is straight to the point: “It’s the amateur”.
Upload Cinema is a monthly video spree that quite literally takes the most valuable YouTube gems to the big screen. That is, the not-so-big one of the Uitkijk, the smallest and coziest movie theater in Amsterdam.
Dutch creative director Dagan Cohen and cinema programmer Barbara de Wijn started the initiative because they thought (the best) YouTube videos deserved a bigger screen. So, to make sure they selected only the most compelling, they made the format of their cinematic get-together strictly editorial and topical, with a monthly theme explored with the help of experts and, of course, crowd-sourced suggestions from the users of their website.
Thanks to Twitter, I (Janice Wong – cellist and New Media student at the UvA) was given a great opportunity to perform on stage at Melkweg, Amsterdam last night with my idol: UK Grammy award winner Imogen Heap.
Since Monday the 27th September I am a new Wikipedia author and I must admit that I like it. I can’t name reasons why I didn’t try it before but now I know that I don’t want to stop contributing to Wikipedia anymore. So you will very likely read more articles in the future which were written or changed by…
Working towards a fully connected professional world
Eugenie van Wiechen is the Dutch main director of LinkedIn, the largest professional networking site in the world with more than 55 million. Today on PICNIC10 she gave her vision on the growth of LinkedIn in the past few years especially in Holland. The critical question remains: “How to make…