Mobile Learning Game Kit
Together with the HvA Medialab and Waag Society, Mediastudies is developing a Mobile Learning Game Kit, an educational tool that works with mobile and wireless devices. The Game Kit, developed with funding from SURF, was presented at the SURF Onderwijsdagen 2006 through this little – and admittedly slightly boring – video. (The page requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher: apparently Firefox, Mozilla, and Safari haven’t made their way to Wageningen University where the film was produced)
The closing session of MyCreativity continued the previous session on dispatches from the city: Examples of the Creative Industry -or insert preffered term here- from around Europe. The first session covered Vienna, Dublin, Barcelona and Basel.
In this second session we’re venturing into London, Helsinki, Berlin and with Rotterdam we’re bringing MyCreativity back home to the Netherlands. What follows are my observations, thoughts and questions on the presentations. (more…)
Google is still maintaining it’s strong number one position in the search engine landscape. Microsoft is trying to get back by launching it’s new Live Search service, but are they strong enough to overthrow the almighty Google? This is one of the questions I asked myself for my BA thesis. And of course there are still Ask.com and Yahoo! (which is focusing more on social search).
These big media conglomerates are dominating the search engine landscape and there seems to be an endless media concentration going on. What is the impact on the access to information when only a few players dominate the market?
Wednesday the 22nd of November is Election Day in The Netherlands. Which party has the most promising program for New Media scientists, New Media creators/designers, and New Media consumers? Which party will invest in New Media developers and theorists, in order to put The Netherlands on top of the technological and innovative map?
This two-hour lecture covered the cities of Vienna, Dublin, Barcelona and Basel (Switzerland).
Monika Mokre and Elisabeth Mayerhofer covered Vienna, Aphra Kerr covered Dublin, Barbara Strebel covered Basel, and Matteo Pasquinelli covered Barcelona.
The lecture started with Vienna, which was delivered at lightning speed. I didn’t know Austrians could speak English that fast. This made it hard for me to keep up since I’m not good at multi-tasking (and taking notes + listening attentively = multitasking). But I think I got the gist of it:
Creative labour as the basis for a critique of creative industries policy- David Hesmondhalgh
At this presentation Hesmondhalgh would to like think about how an analysis of creative labour might contribute to critique. Therefore he suggests three critical approaches to creative labour:
1. NICL: This term was created by Toby Miller, who adapted the concept of this theory from the Marxian idea of New International Division of labour (NIDL). This theory of Toby Miller can be found in his book Global Hollywood 2 . In this book Miller explains various ways in which the NICL principle gets translated into the public domain, such as the use of cheaper sites overseas for animation; the harmonizing of copyright law and practice.
Some visitors of MyCreativity’s opening night might have been a bit surprised when they found out where it took place. The contrast between the friendly squat named Chequepoint at Damrak 16 and the overly capitalist surroundings could hardly have been bigger. The fact that the building used to be a bank might compensate for that.
As the rain came pouring down all different kinds of people, students, academics, professionals, artists and squatters, started mingling upstairs in a gezellige atmosphere entertained by a DJ and free drinks.
Mark Poster is a professor of history at the History department of the University of California. His special academic interests are: European Intellectual and Cultural History; Critical Theory; Media Studies. Last year we have read one of his articles “Foucault and databases” for another one of our classes.
For our new media theories class we’re reading literature about locative media and that’s why we are reading Poster’s article: “Digitally Local Communications: Technologies and Space”
The article can be found here:
http://www.locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?cspaces;poster
(more…)
In the second part of the second session Economy of Design Rogerio Lira, graphic designer and former student of the Sandberg Institute presented his project “Love-work: autonomous research in progress.”
His work is about the dynamics and interaction between people, the media, their emotions, their relationships and their creative processes.
The title of the second session is Economy of Design. In this context Mieke Gerritzen & Teun Castelein presented the Artvertising project of the Sandberg Institute.
The project is based on the Million Dollar Homepage which is an idea of student Alex Tew. He sold a million pixels on his website for $1 each to pay for his degree. The visual result of his homepage was a huge fragmented landscape filled with logos. This visual landscape is not new to us, it actually has a long history from cave art to frescoes to Times Square. As Marshall McLuhan put it: “Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century“
Matteo Pasquinelli took the podium for the second presentation, followed by Rosalind Gill and Danielle van Diemen.
(more…)
At around 10:15 the usual suspects started showing up, including my fellow master students (some of us are aware that a 10 a.m. start means 10:30 in conference-speak). Geert Lovink (see photo) opened the proceedings as laptops took over the podium. Ned Rossiter (see photo), whose new book was presented a little while ago, reminded the crowd that we are here to look at creative industries in ways that are not covered by policy-makers. To see the issues that may have slipped through the cracks. We need to ask the right questions: what is creative labour? What are the conditions? How can we solve the problem of precarity? (More about precarious workers later on).
The city of Groningen has installed CCTVs with sound sensors that respond to aggressive voice raising. The police can thus anticipate fights, physical abuse, riots and other threats to public order and intervene before anything serious will have happened. Like Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s MINORITY REPORT. A news item on this subject can be seen at the website of RTL4:
http://www.rtl.nl=Anti-aggressiecamera’s.
An example of ‘premediation’ maybe? This is the term Richard Grusin coined for the way media do not reflect upon but anticipate and prestage events, in his essay ‘Premediation‘ (Criticism 46.1 (2004) 17-39).
I want to post a discussion question here about the use of the classic philosophers (ie Aristotle, Plato, etc.) and the link with New Media studies. And also a call for links on this subject, if anyone knows any.
This question came to me when I was reading ‘The Six Elements and the Causal Relations Among Them’ by Brenda Laurel. She talks about the links between Aristotle’s Poetics and Human-Computer interaction. She does give us some striking examples, like the link between characters in a play doing things “out of the blue” and a word processor with an automatic correction doing things “out of the blue” (see your T9 mobile textbook perhaps).
I’ve also blogged about Plato’s Republic and the history of the internet. And the links are quite remarkable when you read the original text by Plato. I thought I was reading the history of the internet itself, written by Plato himself. But the question is, are we seeing things they never really meant while writing? Is that even relevant? Or are we seeing patterns that dominate life through the ages? Or…?
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On Thursday November 16th Julian Kücklich will present his lecture ‘Beyond Narratology or Taking Computer Games Seriously’. Julian Kücklich is co-editor of the latest issue of Fibreculture on ‘Gaming Networks.’
The lecture starts at 4 p.m. In order to allow us to attend this lecture, the session of the New Media Theories class will end at 3.30 pm. |
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In this issue an article by David Nieborg, ‘Mods, Nay! Tournaments, Yay: The Appropriation of Contemporary Game Culture by the U.S. Military.’
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THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
University of Ulster:
Chair: René Glas
Thursday, November 16, 2006
16:00 – 18:00
P.C. Hoofthuis, room 104
Spuistraat 134
Drinks following the lecture
at Ovidius
In a time when everything is about blogging, vlogging and glogging it is necessary to highlight an old school tool used by researchers years before anyone had ever heard of blogs, the mailing list. There are thousands of mailing lists handling almost every subject imaginable and many of them could be of interest to the field of new media research.
I am currently subscribed to a couple of new media related mailing lists and find them of great value. The thing I don’t understand is why these mailing lists haven’t transformed themselves into a more modern and versatile form, like a blog. (more…)
We’ve talked about Participatory Culture in class with Richard Rogers. To get some idea of what this is, here’s some recommended reading: (more…)
In addition to Alexander R. Galloway – Protocol, chapter I: Physical Media, here’s a nice animation:
Second Life is a virtual world that exists on the servers of Linden Lab, nothing is real except the value of real money. Players can open an account and chat with other avatars. The avatars start out naked after which you can shop for clothes at for instance Nike. The money that is exchanged is of the same value in the “real” world. Academics are at this time analyzing the influence of the interaction of a virtual economy with the real economy. Stock analysts are examining investment values of virtual property, the IRS is looking for legal ways to tax players/concerns, and criminals are studying new ways to commit virtual crime/theft.
Second Life has been continuously in the Dutch news this month. It all started with Duran Duran four weeks ago. This long forgotten band from the eighties figured it could make a come-back, a second career, and a virtual success by playing their music for half a million Second Life clients. The obvious reason for this is because the dinosaur aged band members can hide their wrinkled bold heads behind a virtual face lift, the 3D avatars of SL.
When I was at the netcraft website, I was redirected to another interesting article (from the washington post). The WP reports that internet users are very suspicious when they receive spam e-mails, but they let their guard down when they visit a social network website like MySpace, Hyves or Friendster. Therefore they are an easy target for fraudsters to collect millions of login names and passwords that can be abused for identity theft or financial fraud. According to the WP social networking websites are a great target for fraudsters because the users are predominantly youngsters and the culture on these websites encourages sharing of personal information. And that makes these websites a great site for their practices.