New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Encountr: Sharing Experiences in a Media City

With the ubiquitous presence of new media in our urban environments, we can refer to the context that we live in as The Media City. Taking this concept as a main element in our research, our approach has been...

By Talía Cu on 10/21/16 Comments Off

Visualizing Food Systems

What did you have for breakfast? It’s an easy enough question. But how about, where did your breakfast come from? Using innovative data visualization tools, a growing number of developers and activists have created dynamic ways in which human...

By Joe Mier on 03/27/12 Comments Off

When objects talk with each other – the new turn in locative media

This article is a co-creation by Laura Burlacu and Daan Fliervoet In 2003 a workshop hosted by the Latvian RIXC electronic media center first introduced the locative media, a term which has since been used to describe a new...

By Daan Fliervoet on 03/20/12 Comments Off

City Vibes Project – A heartbeat of the city based on its BPM

We choose our music to best fit our mood, our spirit or our activities. We use it to celebrate our victories, to soothe our pain or to give us energy when we are feeling down. This is why ensuring...

By Andrei Florian on 11/01/11 Comments Off

App Review: PhoneGuard. Keeping Parents and Beliebers Happy

Designed with the noble purpose of preventing deadly traffic accidents caused by the distraction of texting while driving, the Phone Guard – Drive Safe application is in fact one new media watchtower for parents and employers to servile teenagers...

By Andrei Florian on 10/11/11 1

‘Consider it a safety Tool.’ – App Review: Glympse

Glympse is a groundbreaking new way to share your location with anyone for a specified period of time using patent-pending GlymseWatch timer. This app enables you to immediately share your location with friends and allows them to track your...

By Roos van Tongerloo on 10/11/11 Comments Off

The Switch: from Matthew Fuller to mobile apps

Erupting Irruption Ask Elk Grove, launched ten days ago for the city of Elk Grove, California, numbers among the newest localized smartphone applications for reporting civic repairs. Most follow agendas similar to GRCity311, an app developed for Grand Rapids,...

By Kendall Grady on 10/10/11 2

App review: Repudo

media.hum.uva.nl/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/repudo-logo1.png">

media.hum.uva.nl/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/repudo-logo1.png" alt="" title="repudo-logo" width="100" height="40" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-22949" /> Repudo, the fysical location bound message service, explained and reviewed. The app proves to be easy to use, original and playful, but still comes with some minor issues...

By Joep Hegger on 10/08/11 1

PICNIC: Life in Readable Cities

Using public transport, we leave digital traces when checking in and out with our OV chip cards. Once our Bonus Card at Albert Heijn got scanned over the counter, we provide Albert with valuable information about what we like...

By Caroline Goralczyk on 09/18/11 3

Augmented reality: the first steps to a society of control?

Layla van Daalen, Chris Hoogeveen, Hanneke Mertens Every aspect of the world has an extra layer of information. It may not always be obvious, but these extra layers are most certainly present. Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis describe these...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 03/13/11 2

Resistance to Locative Media: Google Germany

The Germans proof that castles in the skies can be actualized. A real act of resistance to power has been put . More than 244.000 German internet users requested Google not to photograph their houses for Google Street View. The...

By Mareline Heijman on 11/01/10 3

The Exquisite Digital Corpse

Year: 1925. Place: Rue de Château no. 54, Paris, France. Characters: André Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy. Plot: A group of surrealists invents a collaborative storytelling technique called cadavre exquis (the Exquisite Corpse) named as such...

By Catalina Iorga on 10/18/10 Comments Off

Sometimes its hard to explain myself in greek

It had never crossed my mind to make a Wikipedia entry as I must admit that I never thought of Wikipedia as a reliable source of information and even more as a source that I would refer to in...

By olga paraskevopoulou on 10/03/10 Comments Off

Your City, My City, Our Crowdsourced Social Cities

There’s a new dimension in town. The physical spaces we inhabit are being transformed by cellspace technologies (also referred to as mobile media, wireless media, or location-based media), where data is constantly being delivered to and extracted from mobile...

By Ekaterina Yudin on 10/02/10 2

Reflection and critique on the development of location-based mobile applications.

Location-based applications are the new hype. Their presence is prominent in festivals, conferences and symposia that address to new media technologies, or to use the most recent terminology, that address to cross media developments. Thinkers and researchers either praise...

By olga paraskevopoulou on 09/29/10 Comments Off

Book review, Richard Coyne, “The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media” MIT Press (2010)

In his fourth book, “The Tunign of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media”, Richard Coyne provides a fundamentally different perspective for examining the new technological advancements and the way they are appropriated by humans and are integrated into...

By olga paraskevopoulou on 09/20/10 Comments Off

Performative practices of mapping

“Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of . . . map has multiple entryways as opposed to the tracing, which always goes back “to the same.” The map has to do with performance”. (Deleuze...

By Radmila Radojevic on 05/19/10 1

Google Buzz adoption in Amsterdam

Amsterdam is picking up the new Google Buzz social networking tool that was announced last week. Google has linked Buzz to Latitude as well (depending on the privacy settings). This means that people can see where their friends and...

By Bas Bisseling on 02/13/10 6

digitally distributed newspapers

LG Digital has announced that a full A3 sized e-paper that will be introduced in April. The novelty in LG’s latest marvel, is that it makes the physical distribution and the every day hustle of printing millions of newspapers...

By Bas Bisseling on 02/13/10 9

Locative media: mapping movement trough the city

Locative media genre can evoke uneasy feelings due to its military origin and ties to corporate power trough funding. There is a significant difference between subversive appropriation of the locative media tools such as in art practices and their...

By Radmila Radojevic on 11/02/09 1

The use of locative media in post-catastrophe response

I wonder, therefore, is there any other way we can look into the function of locative media, other than retrieving geo information, playing GPS treasure hunting game (geocaching), or babbling where we have been to? Can we (as...

By Yu-Fen Chen on 10/17/09 Comments Off

ElasticMapping: a locative media project

On Tuesday October 6th, in the Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst in Amsterdam, there was an interesting and envisioning lecture and performance by Amsterdam visual artist Esther Polak (http://realtime.waag.org/). Her main interest in the field of locative media is to...

By Jan Bajec on 10/12/09 Comments Off

Foursquare: Are the benefits of locative social media limited to cities?

FourSquare has recently been described by bloggers as the next great micro-updating service – a geolocative platform that could compliment and even overcome Twitter. Some are even guessing that with its built-in impetus to visit local businesses, it may...

By Allison Guy on 10/05/09 1

Locative Media as a Solution to the Crisis in Theatre

A crisis often foreshadows a shift or indicates a need for change. In the theatre’s case, the crisis is a reflection of undergoing changes in its form. Perhaps the general categorization of theater, performance and art needs to be...

By Cornelia Scripca on 09/02/09 1