Masters of Media

For anyone interested in design, open source and open design, my recently finished (june 2012) MA Thesis is available for download here. Below is the thesis’ abstract:

Following the course of web 2.0, user-generated content and open source software; design disrupts the traditional chain of production and opens itself. Open design is categorized by peer reviewed downloadable products that can…

Templates are ready-made project files that can be customized and used as the basis for various types of media content. In the world of graphic design, web design and motion graphic design, the use of templates is widely spread. But what is the state of templates in the world of data visualization?

Picture “Basement Books” is taken by Vaguery and published under a CC-BY license

The last decade, a tremendous effort has been made to make more cultural heritage data, both metadata as well as the actual content, digitally available for everybody to re-use. Many studies have shown that that giving free access to this data…

Blogging has dramatically changed the fashion industry in just a few years and fashion bloggers have now evolved from denounced outsiders to admired insiders. Today, bloggers are not only updating their audiences with the newest fashion reports, celebrity news and backstage pictures, but they have become celebrities themselves. Sitting front row at fashion shows during [...]

One topic which has fascinated me for a considerable period of time is the coexistence of the multiple facets of the online and the offline universes: is the digital identity distinct from what is commonly understood as the physical identity? Do they intersect each other and, if so, to which extent? Do virtual and material [...]

This afternoon, you might tag where you have been for lunch on facebook, or even a few minutes ago, your smartphone might update you with new emails. Information and Communication Technology(ICT) already became pervasive to our daily life, pervasive enough to threaten individual information unknowingly in the huge data network. So, ICT policy has been concerning [...]

“Technique and technology are important, but adding trust is the issue of the decade” Tom Peters, business author Let’s play a game: try to find inappropriate word in a line. Bears, matryoshka dolls, vodka, Red Square, KGB, birch, e-commerce… Do you think that “e-commerce” is definitely not the word that can characterize Russia? Business analysts [...]

Love to watch your shows online? Like to create Nutella memes to get on the hot page of 9GAG? Want to rock out in your bedroom on Gangnam Style to put it on your YouTube Channel just like Keenan Cahill did? This might all be illegal someday. Even though the Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement has been set [...]

A Liberty-Security Tradeoff in Public Policy for the Location Information Technology in South Korea This afternoon, you might tag where you have been for lunch on facebook, or even a few minutes ago, your smartphone might update you with new emails. Information and Communication Technology(ICT) already became pervasive to our daily life, pervasive enough to threaten [...]

“We have lived through more than half a century of being constantly told that the future of food was artificial, the future of books, newspapers, medicine and school was virtual. And that we would soon deal entirely with computerized teachers and doctors through screens. For most of that time, the predictions seemed only too true” (Boyle, 2004). [...]

If you enjoy roaming the virtual streets of Google Maps’ Street View, take a deep breath and dive into the unique visual experience of “Gigapixel photography”. A gigapixel photograph is, mathematically speaking, an image that consists of one billion pixels, or around 125 times more than the capabilities of the 8-megapixel sensors of most modern [...]

On the 17th of June in 1972, 5 men got caught while attempting to infiltrate the democratic headquarters located at the Watergate hotel in Washington. Their objective was the placement of electronic listening devices to monitor the meeting hosted by the democrats. This operation was conducted by Richard Nixon, the former president of the United [...]

I imagine myself at 14 years old winding the tapes back and forward with a pen and listening to Metallica for the hundredth time. Well, nothing else mattered at that time. Most Romanian around their 30thies grew up with rock music and songs for revolted people. They liked the music their parents were forbidden to [...]

Nowadays, the medium of photography is accessible to everybody, everywhere. The development of new media technologies opened this way of presentation, which was once privileged to experts, to the general public. Especially the emergence of digital cameras and smartphones, which integrate various camera applications (e.g. Instagramm), simplifies the documentation of memorable, but also random events [...]

The internet beast “What technology wants”, a tellingly title of the most recent book by Kevin Kelly. As if technology is an autonomous living being possessing an own will. Although Kelly is more nuanced than this (for a book review see this post), this view on technology is not very uncommon within public discourse. In [...]

  Most of you will be probably familiar with the term of video art, the new emerging movement of art that fascinates people of different background, age and interests worldwide. However, a brief-though concise definition,as given in Wikipedia is the following: Video art is a type of art which relies on moving image and comprises [...]

This February I attended a movie screening at a small cinema in central Gothenburg in Sweden. The movie shown was BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS!* (2012) by Swedish director Fredrik Gertten. This film is a true and thrilling story that reveals how far a big corporation is willing to go in order to protect it´s brand [...]

Until next summer, a visit to the Science Museum in London can be more than a thrilling experience. Among seven floors of exhibitions, it can be found in the basement the new Google Web Lab, which is running until June 2013 online and inside the museum. It consists of five interactive installations and they are [...]

Nowadays, people tend to always want to aim higher, wanting to succeed in their career as well as their personal life. They work on perfecting their image and are willing to go far for the sake of being closest to perfection. And who wouldn’t want to feel perfect and detoxified from the inside out? Or [...]

It’s been almost 20 years since the web made its grand entrance into the lives of average consumers. It was around that time the internet was also opened for business and companies started assessing it for its profitability. Initially the idea of the web was to promote as much free content as possible and in [...]