Masters of Media

The Defeat of Time at Sonic Acts: Pitch Police says “Respect the Hertz!”

The drone. An unmanned aircraft, flying over enemy territory by itself. Secretly photographing enemy targets. Session moderator Mike Harding vividly explains to the audience at De Balie, during Sonic Acts XII, the properties of the drone, which is, in...

By Twan Eikelenboom on 02/26/08 1

The Diorama Revisited: Erkki Huhtamo at Sonic Acts

Erkki Huhtamo’s recent work deals with media archeology, an emerging approach he, according to his website, ‘has pioneered (together with others, like Siegfried Zielinski) since the early 1990’s’. At this edition of Sonic Acts, Huhtamo, together with the audience,...

By Twan Eikelenboom on 02/25/08 2

Video Vortex Vlog

░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ I (almost) finished the Video Vortex vlog. you can check it out here ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░

By Rosa Menkman on 02/24/08 Comments Off

Julien Maire – Digit

░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ In the foyer of the Balie, Julien Maire performed his live piece “Digit”; the writer sits at his desk with a glass of wine and a pile of paper. There are no writing tools, no pen, no typewriter,...

By Rosa Menkman on 02/24/08 Comments Off

Interactivity and Immersion/ Sonic Acts XII

Moderated by Arie Altena, this part of the session the artists Jeffrey Shaw from Australia and the Dutch Marnix de Nijs talked about their work with video, ambient screens and immersive techniques. The session took off with a quote...

By Paulien Dresscher on 02/23/08 Comments Off

A Blog Meme: Zero Comments

Via email I was notified that we were tagged by a blog meme, asking to write down sentences 6-8 from page 123 of the nearest book. Just coming home from Geert Lovink’s book presentation and thus having his book...

By Erik Borra on 02/13/08 6

Meta-humor at Daily Kos

This diary at Daily Kos confused me at first, because it was completely empty. No title, no text: there was nothing there. But looking at the various tags for the diary makes it clear why:

Justification for Iran War,...

By Michael Stevenson on 02/12/08 1

Del.icio.us and Procrastination

I've finished a short piece on tagging as a form of classification, called Getting Things Done?

Why do tomorrow what can be put off until the day after?

I've been reading some classic texts on categorization and how...

By Michael Stevenson on 02/11/08 Comments Off

Chun and Galloway on Freedom

Both authors contribute strongly towards the definition of freedom, and misconceptions of freedom within a networked society. Galloway argues that the founding principal of the net is control, not freedom. But it is a different kind of...

By Tjerk Timan on 02/04/08 Comments Off

Google Strikes Back in China’s Holiday Migration Chaos

The last few weeks it has been in the news numerous times; in Guangzhou, South China, snow and ice storms have stranded tens of millions of people, most of them migrant workers traveling to their families to celebrate the...

By Pieter-Paul Walraven on 02/01/08 4

International Delete Your Myspace Account Day: The Morning After is Elfriendo Day!

Deleting your MySpace page is painful. You had friends, too few or too many. It had taken over your life, or you wish it had. Was your profile stale? Were you too active? The morning after International Delete Your...

By Esther Weltevrede on 01/29/08 Comments Off

Remixing Cinema Discussion Streams: Sean Cubitt and Lev Manovich

For the Danube Telelecture series, Sean Cubitt ( “Immersion, Connectivity, Conviviality”) and Lev Manovich (“After Effects, or Invisible Revolution”) gave lectures and discussed the topic of Remixing Cinema: The Future and Past of the Moving Image. Cinema as a...

By Twan Eikelenboom on 01/24/08 Comments Off

Video vortex; video slamming

The closing session of the conference was named video slamming and consisted of screening famous youTube favorites, interviews with video performers Emile Zile Sam Nemeth, Tatiana de la O, and Rosa Menkman and the actual video performances. All this...

By Tjerk Timan on 01/21/08 2

Paranoia and Premediation – Richard Grusin’s 1/20/09

Richard Grusin has a video up called 1-20-09. Along with some others, Grusin has 'entertained' the fear that the Warner act of 2007 will keep George Bush in office next year (something Bush could do relatively easily...

By Michael Stevenson on 01/21/08 1

Video Vortex: Participatory Culture

Do you think Participatory Culture is all about friendly cooperation? Fans flocking to Star Wars conventions or squad based play in the latest MMORPG? The Participatory Culture session at the international Video Vortex conference in Amsterdam, proved that practices...

By Twan Eikelenboom on 01/20/08 1

Video Vortex: Curating Online Video

This part of the conference is dealing with curating online video and was moderated by Vera Tollmann. The main question was why filmmakers and artists working with moving images don’t occupy Youtube as the perfect way to archive and...

By Paulien Dresscher on 01/20/08 4

Video Vortex: Dan Oki, ‘Cinema as Research Database’

The final speaker for the session Cinema and Narrativity was visual artist Dan Oki. In contrast to Jan Simons and Thomas Elsaesser, who drew on 'old media' to analyze the Web, Oki's talk focused on how the database...

By Michael Stevenson on 01/20/08 Comments Off

Video Vortex: Jan Simons on the narrative of tagging

The presentation given by Jan Simons is called Weddings, Cities and Colors via tagging. Simons has performed a short study into user generated content and user generated indexing. With a background in cinema and narrative, Simons is interested in...

By Tjerk Timan on 01/19/08 1

Video Vortex: Thomas Elsaesser on ‘Constructive Instability’

'Constructive instability' is how Condoleeza Rice described the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in the summer of 2006. It's a term that brings to mind tropes of globalization - maybe a synonym of precarity, or the state that produces a desire for...

By Michael Stevenson on 01/19/08 4

Video Vortex: Alternative platforms and software

This session is the most concrete session of today. The focus is on practical views on online video from the perspective of speakers' practices. How do video artist, activists, programmers and curators deal with copyright issues, publishing and distributing...

By Esther Weltevrede on 01/19/08 4

Video Vortex: Online Video Aesthetics

To much disliking of my parents, as a kid I frequently would watch low budget television programs based on audience generated video fragments and unscripted pranks. These programs included the popular America’s Funniest Home Videos and candid camera shows...

By Roman Tol on 01/19/08 3

Video Vortex: Ted Sterngast – The aesthetics of videoblogging

Tal Sterngast is the second speaker in the block hosted by Patricia Pisters about online video aesthetics. Sterngast made videos for the German newswebsite Netzeitung named Karasek Speaks from March 2006 till April 2007. She speaks about the program,...

By Laura van der Vlies on 01/19/08 1

Video Vortex: opening session Friday January 18

Introduction Yesterday the workshop, this morning the start of the two-day “Video Vortex – responses to YouTube”, an international conference organized by the Institute of Network Cultures at PostCS11, Amsterdam. A good crowd fills the hall at the 11th...

By Jasper Moes on 01/19/08 8

Apple bombs blogosphere with an airstrike

For the next few days Apple will rule the blogosphere and all of that had to do with the keynote presentation Steve Jobs gave at the MacWorld 2008 conference. It started yesterday and will...

By Maarten van Sprang on 01/16/08 1