Google Wave is waving at YOU
Google Wave attempts to encourage Google users jump out of search box. To start with Google Wave, you need to find ‘friends’ in order to wave each other. Revealing your real identity is the first as well as a...
Blog-art
A Few weeks ago I attended the Blog-art Festival in The Hague. I was eager to see how they interpreted the concept of ‘blog-art’, but as it turned out they did not interpreted it at all.
Augmenting your way through walls (and other applications)
Our world today becomes more and more penetrated by screens. Wherever we go, information is made available through dynamic surfaces, which can adapt to whichever piece of information that is relevant at that specific time and place. More than...
Snapping Profile Snaps
Recently, checking my RSS reader I came across this: Profile Snaps. TechCrunch was serious about it: Recently launched Profile Snaps allows for additional context for content on news websites and blogs, by providing in-text profiles that gives the reader...
“Frames of War” meets Games of War
In Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Judith Butler posits that modern warfare is waged both on the battlefield and in the media. As this is nothing new to propaganda studies, Butler qualifies her views by propounding that the...
Mapping politics through art. Is it effective?
When the french philosopher Alain Badiou presented his essay “Fifteen Thesis on Contemporary Art” published in 2004, he took an artwork by Mark Lombardi, as an illustration of his talk. This artwork was a map. It was more exactly...
A Wiki Noob
Posting a new entry on Wikipedia is not very difficult, but keeping it online is an impossible mission. These were the first lines of this post when I started writing it a couple of weeks ago. By now I...
Contesting our Cultural Heritage
There has always been fear towards new technologies that create new ways of recording and sharing cultural products. The videotape made owners of these products extremely nervous, because it allowed viewers stay at home to record and share what...
The Public Library as Instigator of a Modern Public Sphere
The digitalization of information has been a hot topic ever since the arrival of the computer. The internet must be the world’s biggest library by now. The classical role of the library is becoming old fashioned and maybe even...
Paranoid of the Proprietary: To Skype or Not to Skype
Today at the eComm conference, Sten Tamkivi presented an informative range of statistics of Skype use. Some 8% of all telecom “minutes” are routed by Skype as of last year. This is a huge portion of the total for...
RjDj and the rise of ‘reactive’ music.
As our daily interactions are increasingly affected by the use of mobile wireless devices and technologies, new media seems to become more reactive to our actual environment. Is there an attributable value of our environment to the means of...
RFID & wireless surveillance in the Internet of Things
In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices. These will probe and monitor our bodies, even our dreams.” A RFID chip consists of...
Fear And Leisure In São Paulo
A few weeks ago I watched Richard Williams’ lecture about ‘Architecture and Economies of Violence in São Paulo’ as part of the workshop ‘Globalization and Violence’. It doesn’t have to do so much with new media in particular but...
Augmented Reality: From Interactive Music Videos to a New World Perspective
In this post I would like to continue on the subject of augmented reality implemented in our daily lives that is brought up bij Kesh. John Mayer is the first artist that has made an augmented reality videoclip. To...
Google Maps and Google Earth In The Classroom
Longitude and latitude coordinates are like the words we use to tell a story and only gain substance when we use them in context. With a list of resources to help teachers, Google Maps and Google Earth are helping...
God how I love technology…
This extremely short blogpost serves to introduce two crazy interesting developments : The Iphone driven car & The supercool use of Augmented Reality by Lego one word… wow
New Media Protocols and the Artist (Rasing his Voice?)
In my research paper – which I will be writing the next two months, I want to deepen the discussion around new media art and its relation to political and social engagement. While net.art has always taken a very...
Bringing media back to space
Every day our lives seem to require more and more ‘new media’ to keep up the pace. GPS on cellphones, possibility of instant communication either online or via phone, a wii to make sure we do some sports, and...
Wikipedia = Local-Narrative
Jean-François Lyotard, a French philosopher and postmodern theorist, talks about “meta-narratives” and “local-narratives”. According to him, a meta-narrative is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. Briefly, in concept of...
Changing Turn in Copyright Debate: Cultural Industry is to Move
Many theorist have already expressed their concern with the current copyright system; Simon Frith (1987), Lawrence Lessig (2002), Yochai Benkler (2005), Hal R. Varian (2005), Chris Anderson (2009) and many others. A lot of their arguments are based on...
GPS moving beyond locating
GPS in daily life is mostly used for connecting to the internet and navigating through an area. The focus of these types of GPS is giving you a precise location or finding a precise location. What would happen if...
The Anti-Googlization: How Alternative Search Engines Find Their Way on the Web
On the website googlizationofeverything.com, theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan states that the current web is dominated in several ways by search engine Google. Google related sites and ‘Googleware’ like Google Books and Google Earth and the video channel YouTube. In a...
Tim Berners-Lee in Amsterdam: On the World Wide Web and Social Development in Africa
The World Wide Web and Social Development symposium at the VU University Amsterdam welcomed a variety of prominent speakers to discuss answers to the question: How can the Web contribute to the social and economic development in the world?...