Masters of Media

(A blogpost on Holmes Wilson’s presentation, originally published @ Video Vortex #6 website. The original text can be found here)

The importance of subtitles is an undeniable fact for Holmes Wilson, co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Through the foundation’s  latest open source, software-based project

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Layla van Daalen, Chris Hoogeveen, Hanneke Mertens

Every aspect of the world has an extra layer of information. It may not always be obvious, but these extra layers are most certainly present. Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis describe these extra layers as a form of augmented space.  This is an extra layer of information, of data visualization on top of…

Ourania Dalalaki, Ashiq Khondker, Maritje Onjering, Hans Terpstra

mini-exhibition curated for the Critical Media Art seminar.

Disengage from the fear of technology, engage living forms through technicity, transform life, choose life.

Living, Semi-living, bio-creations that tactically aim to shape life.
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With the mission of defining 'the future of information consumption', the founders of Qwiki, a self-proclaimed multimedia alternative to the text-based search provided by Google state to have launched the 'next big thing': a narrative search-tool based on the computer 'telling you a story' accompanied by videos and pictures about the term you are looking for. "Whether you’re planning a vacation on the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family Google TV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that's quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search."

In this session we focus on the contemporary connections between science, technology, and politics. The connections between these three domains are often neglected or unjust presented as complete seperated area’s. Bruno Latour speaks of matters that matter, by which a public around an issue (that matters) is created. Without a concern, there is nobody interested in a debate logically spoken.…

The networked structure of digital communication channels was illuminated when internet and digital communication networks were shut down in Egypt. It was also at this moment that the nation-state aspect of networked communication (the physicality of the square and of analog forms of communication) and its relationship to the digital networks was complicated.

The current situation in Egypt, where…

The Technology Entertainment and Design conference, better known as TED, has spread its worthy ideas annually since 1990. The last couple of years the TED-virus has spread the world as TED became globally known by letting their talks be viewed online for free. As a result the wide range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture of TED are also being addressed here in Amsterdam under the label of TEDx events. Its popularity seems undeniable, but what is the value of TED to us?

Plenty has been written about our loss of social cohesion due to the Internet (see James Katz) and how mobile phone technology has contributed to blunting our social competencies (see Hans Geser). Like it or not we are often rendered limp at the DVD rental shop or supermarket isle calling our husbands or girlfriends asking: “So what did you say you felt like eating for dinner? Or “Have you seen the latest Woody Allen?”

So following the 48hrs of eagerly anticipating to see my profile picture set up on my new eDarling.se profile, which should ‘guarantee me up to an 80 percent greater chance in meeting a potential partner’ I have  been sent an email, stating my picture has been rejected. REJECTED! The dating site I am registered with refuses to recognize…

‘Ce que le web fait, c’est de matérialiser des éléments qu’on ne voyait pas et qu’on ne pouvait pas tracer auparavant, par le fait d’avoir un login, un écran, un clavier, des avatars‘[1] Latour

Internet applications offer opportunities for collaboration and for the generation and distribution of knowledge. The new technologies and software enable users to adopt new…

Reading and publishing in the digital age

The conventional notion of the book, based on centuries of print, is rapidly growing outdated. The book is coming unbound in a double sense: both freed from the bindings of the printed volume, and from the limitations of conventional text. The entire concept of ‘bookness’ needs reinvention. Critical cultural forces must step in…

A description of the second and third day of LabSurLab where I met with the founders of FRACTALAB. Latter is focused on a multidisciplinary idea to create open space for the youth in the coffee region of Colombia (Eje Cafetero). Through art projects and the use of public spaces, they try to generate a view that is different from the mainstream.

LabSurLab is a gathering of different worldwide Labs taking place in Medellín first time this year. From the 6th of April to the 12th of April different projects will present their work and exchange ideas on subjects such as community improvement, hardware recycling and open source applications amongst others.

You might recognize the feeling of  a brief immediate panic, one where your hands fail to remain dry, your mouth goes depleted and you experience slight nausea, recently it happened to me. I had just committed my first ever Facebook grand theft, and for a whole six minutes I felt deviant, immoral and just plain bad.  I even…

Introduction

In recent years there has been an increase in interest for international scientific collaboration (Luukkonen, 1993, Ponds, 2008), but the phenomenon is anything but recent: the first signs of it where seen in the nineteenth century (Luukkonen, 1993: 1).

According to Roderik Ponds we can define ’scientific research collaboration’ as an collaborative arrangement between organizations [or institutions] on the…

Emotion has long since been a fraught with subjectivity and complex interpretations for as long as scholars have sought to understand it. When scientists became interested in emotion in the late 19th century it suffered under labels like “feminine”, “spiritual” and “out of control”. As an object of study it was at odds with the scientific laboratory that was a “masculine”, “physically grounded” and “highly controlled” space. The notion of science as a rational activity therefore clashed with the study of difficult-to-grasp, fuzzy, uncontrolled emotions. After all, scientific principles involved rational thought, logical arguments, testable hypotheses, and repeatable experiments. The only leeway allowed was for “non-interfering emotions” like curiosity, frustration and the pleasure in new discoveries.

The basic idea behind information visualization (InfoVis) is that it takes an otherwise stagnant data set of facts and numbers and transforms into an imagery filled with visual patterns and elements.  While this idea is certainly not new it has been regenerated from the cartographer days to a more modern means to express and exchange information for a variety of…

Earlier this month multiple Facebook users gathered at the Centre for Internet and Society, in Bangalore, to participate in a workshop dedicated to Facebook Resistance. They were given an on-site opportunity to go beyond the laws and constraints of FB’s software. After the participants experimented with browsers hacks to locally modify Fb,…

Can visualization influence people? I mean can we prove it?

This core dilemma pondered at the heart of Enrico Bertini’s latest post on FILWD was incidentally triggered by a question from an audience member at his latest talk on data visualization. The inquiry sought an evidence-based answer from academia concerning assurance on whether research studies exist supporting

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According to Bernhard Rieder’s presentation “The contextualized history of data / information visualization” there was always a necessity of visualizing the information we gathered throughout centuries about the world. Through the curiosity and the hunger for knowledge of the human mind we have created the necessity to immortalize and to order the data we already gathered while we…