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Morgan Currie

I’m an American with eight years of experience in video production, but today I'm a student in Amsterdam, thinking a lot about mediums, the Media, technology, and humans & machines communicating in their specific, special ways. I'm finding methods to give these thoughts a space of their own.

http://avalice.wordpress.com/
AAAARG bernhard reider Bruce Sterling computational turn cultural analytics digital archive distant reading franco moretti gift economy google Google Books infographics Ingmar Weber katherine hayles Lev Manovich p2p Publishing rhizome Sean Dockray Society of the Query

Theory on Demand: an interview with editor Margreet Riphagen

Margreet Riphagen is the Institute of Network Culture‘s project manager and the editor of the Theory on Demand book series. Here she explains TOD project’s background and how it operates as action-oriented research – and also proof the exploding...
By Morgan Currie on 06/22/11 Comments Off on Theory on Demand: an interview with editor Margreet Riphagen

Government Works in the Public Domain – All Your Tax-paid Content are Belong to Us

The Free Culture Research Conference last month 8-10 October (2010) devoted one of its panels to the notion that governments should explicitly release public materials – data, photographs, film – to the public domain. The moderator was Mathias Schindler...
By Morgan Currie on 11/10/10 3

Geert Lovink: ‘Critique of the Free and Open’ Keynote

Here’s my long-due report on Geert Lovink‘s keynote speech at the Free Culture Research Conference that took place in Berlin 8-10 October (2010). You can also read more on the conference website. As Lovink described it in his keynote,...
By Morgan Currie on 11/10/10 4

Angst About the Future of the Book at Edinburgh’s Book Fest

It’s always a pleasure to hear publishers hash out their anxieties about the future. You get passionate, articulate types – fanatic bibliophilia often attracts peoples to the business to begin with – who pounce on issues with impressive granularity....
By Morgan Currie on 09/02/10 Comments Off on Angst About the Future of the Book at Edinburgh’s Book Fest
Publishing In Convergence on -empyre-

Publishing In Convergence on -empyre-

This month on -empyre-, a forum that facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media, you’ll find a collaborative discussion unfolding about seismic shifts shaking up the publishing industry. Conversations so far have spanned...
By Morgan Currie on 06/10/10 Comments Off on Publishing In Convergence on -empyre-

Google Books to Pay Scholars to Dig into its Digital Stacks

Google has “quietly” decided to pay humanities researchers $50,000 a year to dig into all the rich metadata accruing from its 12 million and counting library. Franco Moretti, whose “distant reading” analyzes literary trends from statistical data rather than...
By Morgan Currie on 04/25/10 Comments Off on Google Books to Pay Scholars to Dig into its Digital Stacks

E-mobility versus Immobility at Electrosmog

De Balie’s Electrosmog festival this week argues that in the age of hypermobility, staying put can be a tactic of sustainability in itself. The festival self-consciously explores the ways we might reduce our carbon footprint by substituting technology for...
By Morgan Currie on 03/20/10 8
Katherine Hayles Keynote Address at the Computational Turn

Katherine Hayles Keynote Address at the Computational Turn

How many books can a person to read in a lifetime? In her keynote address at Swansea University’s Computational Turn workshop, Katherine Hayles surmised that if we read a book a day till we’re 85, it would amount to...
By Morgan Currie on 03/13/10 1
Small is Beautiful: a discussion with AAAARG architect Sean Dockray

Small is Beautiful: a discussion with AAAARG architect Sean Dockray

One of my favorite websites is the semi-obscure digital library known as AAAARG (don’t even try googling. You just get pirate-themed sites). The site is a sundry collection of critical documents – many of them highly treasured theoretical classics,...
By Morgan Currie on 01/05/10 16

Quality and Cultural Artifacts in the Digital Stream

You Me and Everyone We Know is a Curator was a one-day conference on December 19 about curatorial standards in the digital age. The clunky title, a nod to Miranda July’s similarly named feature film, gets to the core...
By Morgan Currie on 12/23/09 1

Bruce Sterling: Gothic Chic in the Future Favela

Bruce Sterling delivered the futurist goods at this weekend’s lean but excellent conference You Me and Everyone We Know is a Curator. Here’s a transcription of the entire delivery typed up as best I could, but it still doesn’t...
By Morgan Currie on 12/21/09 18

Super 90s Hacker Video Mash-up

New York based curator Laurel Ptak strung together this mash-up of Hollywood films from the 90s and early 2000s depicting the moment of the hack, that roller coaster ride through the computer's dark neon tubes in pursuit of some...
By Morgan Currie on 11/25/09 3

Ingmar Weber: Free the Query Logs

With Google seeping into every nook of the Society of the Query conference – the subject, direct or indirect, of most presentations and discussions – you might ask why Google isn’t here to speak for itself. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly,...
By Morgan Currie on 11/17/09 Comments Off on Ingmar Weber: Free the Query Logs

Cell Phone Apps and Scaling the Local

Cell phones applications for development might be what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls countergeographies – they piggy back on mainstream infrastructure produced by a global corporate economy, but for their own aims, including political struggles (or crime). It helps to...
By Morgan Currie on 10/17/09 Comments Off on Cell Phone Apps and Scaling the Local

Dolphins, Spectograms, and Scorescapes: an interview with Yolande Harris

Did you know Herman Melville’s sperm whale was silent? That’s because he wrote Moby Dick in 1851, seventy years before bioacoustic devices revealed that whales, insects, and other seemingly dumb creatures create sounds beyond human hearing range. So what...
By Morgan Currie on 10/13/09 4

Journalism, Meet Twitter (two paradoxes)

“Weird: I tweeted, Anderson Cooper’s person saw it, seconds later I’m phoning in to CNN on the Letterman affair(s). Talk about Twitter power” – Howard Kurtz’s Twitter feed, for the Washington Post. Traditional journalism is having to contend with...
By Morgan Currie on 10/05/09 5
How Can Artists Use Social Networks?

How Can Artists Use Social Networks?

Artists and the Ontological Web “As an artist I find that social networking technology is ontological.” -Andres Manniste on Nettime, March 2008. As we use the web we construct a portrait of ourselves over time: what sites we return to,...
By Morgan Currie on 09/28/09 3
Hybrids for the Commons

Hybrids for the Commons

Our notion of the commons hails from England, where a maze of paths precluded farmland from encroaching on collectively-owned sites, allowing people to trade, gossip, and entertain each other. These sanctioned areas were only shut down if they weren’t...
By Morgan Currie on 09/26/09 5

Wikipedia Laundry List

It’s easy to love wikipedia. Especially once you’ve joined its fold, embraced the ethos, and gotten the satisfying pay off of adding a page to its massive index. Enthusiasm aside, here’s nine thoughts on research-rich areas for the future...
By Morgan Currie on 09/21/09 2

Chasing Away Ghosts: a Review of Brian Rotman’s Becoming Beside Ourselves

Q: “In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. New Land is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears there?” A: “I don’t know; I’ve seen a...
By Morgan Currie on 09/14/09 1

Infographics for the Great Good (or Who is Otto Neurath?)

Thanks to something called Petabyte computing (one quadrillion bytes of computer information), we’re encountering a number landslide. AT&T has about 16 petabytes of information switching through its network every day. Facebook has 1.5 petabytes worth of user photos alone....
By Morgan Currie on 09/11/09 4