Masters of Media

Call for Applications – International M.A. in New Media 2014-2015

International M.A. in New Media at the University of Amsterdam Call for Applications for Fall 2014, rolling admissions open on December 15, 2013 and close on 1 April 2014 One-year and two-year New Media M.A. Programs available. For the...

By Bernhard Rieder on 12/04/13 Comments Off

Google Spreads Its Wings: Will Flutter Soar or Burn?

Flutter. The name implies flight, but it is actually described as to wave or fly rapidly in an irregular manner or to flap the wings without flying. However, a third way to describe flutter is that it’s the name...

By Vincent Sloof on 11/18/13 1

Have we all become cyborgs?

Since the Internet’s first foray the world has changed drastically. As John L. Friedman explained in his book «The World is Flat» in 2006, the Internet has globalized the world in ways we could not imagine, because people now...

By May Andersen on 11/17/13 4

New ecologies

The advent of new technologies often comes paired with wild utopianism and rampant negativity – it is usually only after the hype has died down that people are starting to think about the material, environmental and ecological dimensions of...

By Jakko Kemper on 11/14/13 Comments Off

Genres for the Digital Hangover

As boundaries between the private and public sphere are beginning to blur. It is getting harder and harder to keep private content private. Most of the times nothing major happens when you send out a personal message into the...

By Bart Schoenmakers on 11/11/13 Comments Off

Truly Going Green

The world is facing a great number of problems in the 21st century: environmental destruction, climate change, massive economic inequality and poverty, the dependence on fossil fuels, ongoing wars and conflicts, physical and mental disease; just to name...

By Gijs van der Grinten on 11/05/13 Comments Off

Cloud Based Web

Overhyped or overmarketed? Cloud based applications involve a number of computers being connected through a real-time connection provided by the networks of the internet. It coins the common goal of enabling customers to outsource specific computer...

By Christoph Rauch on 11/04/13 Comments Off

Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology: an online reading companion

Ian Bogost can be described as a kind of alien, if one considers the many different hats he’s been wearing and some of the funny paradoxes that came along during his career. Holding a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and...

By Paula Carmicino on 11/02/13 Comments Off

Escape the Overcode – Wild Cards project

Brian Holmes wrote the book “Escape the overcode. Activist art in control society” as a part of a wider long-term collaborative research project “Continental Drift”. The research focused on the geopolitics and geopoetics. In the book, Brian Holmes discusses...

By Samantha Carter on 11/01/13 Comments Off

Wild Card Symposium: The Society of the Spectacle

For the Wild Card Symposium of 2013 we have made a short film about Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (originally published in 1967). Six years after Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle, he directed his first feature film...

By Pascal Janssens on 11/01/13 Comments Off

Finite FM | Podcast with Franco Berardi

In 2011 Franco – Bifo – Berardi, an Italian media theorist and media activist, published the book After the Future with AK Press, an anarchistic publishing company. He writes about the idea of the future and the way it is...

By Inte Gloerich on 10/31/13 1

Tactical Media: beyond the digital

In preparation for the Wildcards Symposium as part of the New Media Theories course, we have read and critiqued Rita Raley’s 2009 publication, Tactical Media. Though the book reads as a fairly good overview of the concept of tactical...

By Rebecca Cachia on 10/31/13 Comments Off

8tracks and web-radios: the contemporary music consumption is personal and social

Since the growth of the Internet and its collection of interactive platforms and social networks, the cultural industry has turned a critical corner. This statement is especially true for the music industry in term of music creation and consumption,...

By V Weydert on 10/31/13 Comments Off

Invading Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear

Sonic Warfare: Sound. Affect and the Ecology of Fear is a book written by Dr. Steve Goodman, who has a PhD in Philosophy, but to a whole group of people he might be better known under his alias: Kode9,...

By Vincent Sloof on 10/31/13 Comments Off

Flat Genie: Your trusted resource for living in amsterdam

We proudly present FlatGenie.com, a website developed for the New Media Practices project. Flat Genie is a place to find accurate, personal, and easy-to-use information about living in Amsterdam (and soon other cities around the world). There are three...

By Joram Binsbergen on 10/23/13 1

Digital Hangovers: Capturing an Emergent New Media Phenomenon through DigitalObservatory

Introduction Modern technology has led to a rapidly increasing amount of media objects that can be shared online. Every minute, for instance, more than hundred videos are uploaded on Youtube. Yet, the downside of this development is that what...

By Tessa de Keijser on 10/21/13 1

Visualizing New Media Theories

As part of our New Media Research Practices course, we have been working on a final project consisting of a set of five posters. These posters primarily aim at clarifying material covered in the New Media Theories class,...

By Susan Clandillon on 10/20/13 Comments Off

Scrapebox: a new perspective on an old SEO tool

Scrapebox is a versatile SEO tool but it’s mainly known for its comment spamming functions. The purpose of this article is to show that this software offers many interesting features that could be applied to academic and market reasearch....

By Andrea Fiorentini on 10/12/13 2

Beamer + Art + Space x 1 night

What is BYOB? Bring Your Own Beamer is a concept originated by Amsterdam-born, NY-based artist Rafaël Rozendaal. Since the first event in 2010 in Berlin, the idea has spread to many cities worldwide, reaching upwards to 150 editions. In...

By Paula Carmicino on 10/12/13 Comments Off

The Onion Router. Escaping the prying eyes of Control Society

Last week, first of October, the FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht who is the alleged operator of the digital drug network known as the Silk Road. The Silk Road is a website which is accessible through The Onion Router (TOR)...

By Wannes Sanderse on 10/11/13 Comments Off

‘Users of the World, Unite!’; a step in the right direction?

The increasingly widespread use of social media has given rise to new interactional conditions and the creation of new discursive spaces. These developments also provide firms and organizations with new communicative opportunities and new ways of generating profit. Given...

By Jakko Kemper on 10/11/13 Comments Off

Ideas worth spreading… Is the TED Blog worthwhile?

TED.com is best known for its videos of talks given by experts and up-and-comers in the fields of Technology, Education and Design. Since its inception as a global set of conferences, the TED brand has branched off into many...

By Susan Clandillon on 10/10/13 Comments Off

Hacking the Digital: Fingerprint Secured Touch ID from Apple

The iPhone 5S is a revised version of its predecessor, the iPhone 5, and was unveiled to the general public last month on September 20th. Aside from various improvements and new available features, Apple’s new fingerprint-based identity sensor, Touch...

By Nicholas Vieira on 10/10/13 1

The Building Blocks of Mobile Innovation

“Mobile innovation is over” – Marcus Wohlsen (Wired Magazine) A lot has happened since the first call from a mobile phone has been made by Martin Cooper 1973 from a Motorola phone. Since then the market has been ruled...

By Inte Gloerich on 10/09/13 Comments Off