Masters of Media

The contemporary working environment has changed beyond recognition in many industries; none more so than those invested in new media. The skill sets required to excel in such an environment brings with it a paradigmatic shift in workplace culture and attitudes; owing its legacy in part to the cyber-utopian, libertarian style of many of the [...]

There’s Mercedes-Benz and there are other cars. I’ve always been an admirer of the German super-brand, not only for its outstanding four-wheeled pieces of art, but also for having a spectacular history and the power to constantly re-invent itself. Mercedes-Benz is probably one of the most well-known brands throughout the world, having its name next [...]

“The internet of things: Our things are going to talk to other things, and they are going to be talking to us, and in doing so, it is going to open up the window of opportunity for somebody to interact with us in a manner in which we did not expect. The unintended consequence” Christopher [...]

One of the first goals of the Internet was to expand the knowledge of the users by connecting different data. However, the contemporary web is by no means comparable to this initially academic network. The web expanded unprecedentedly and became more complex and the availability of data grew enormously. Because of this expansion it became [...]

Marriage and Divorce as Performance Washington DC based performance artist Kathryn Cornelius completed her most recent piece, Save the Date, on August 11th, 2012. The work was performed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art as part of Take it to the Bridge, a series of pieces utilizing the glass Performance Bridge at the Corcoran. Cornelius’s stated [...]

For many people, looking at Facebook is the first thing they do when they wake up. There are about 600 million users on Facebook, and you might as well say that Facebook – together with other SNS like Twitter – has a monopoly power on the Internet. This is in strike with the old ideology [...]

Underskog (directly translated from Norwegian meaning “undergrowth” or “underwoods”) is a phenomenon I heard about even before moving to Oslo. Sometime in 2008, my Norwegian friend, being only too happy about being a part of it all, described with almost indecent enthusiasm a closed Internet community one can access by invite only. Facebook was becoming [...]

In March 2012 the animated sitcom South Park aired an episode featuring the potential dangers of memes. Its message: it is impossible to keep up with the latest memes and those who choose to imitate certain memes in public are likely to get hit by an abruptly appearing train. The show warns about a bunch [...]

Simply going to the cinema and watching a film just doesn’t cut it anymore. We, the audience, want more. We want a sequel, we want to look forward to seeing that sequel, we want to discuss what might happen in this sequel with a bunch of other followers, we want to read the book that [...]

This is the question I am still delving into since I joined the startup project TimeBank Romania about 9 months ago. What is TimeBank Romania? Image an online platform where users can exchange knowledge and skills. They do so not by means of money but time, a more affordable currency, especially for a target of [...]

Before closing its doors for good at the end of this year, the Netherlands Media Art Institute dedicates an exhibition to one of the key terms in online culture: openness. Getting lost is one of the annoying, yet inevitable inconveniences of being new to a city. In some cases however, it can be beneficial. A [...]

9GAG is no ordinary user-generated content machine, it’s a repost machine. You could actually call it Reddit Light. But is that really a concern? 90% percent of 9GAG posts are reposts from Reddit. How am I so sure of this? A couple of days ago a user on Reddit named 9FAG_EXPERT presented some results. Taking his [...]

New media, urban culture, personal data and creative ideas: it all came together at the Urban Screens 2011 event last December in Amsterdam. This years subject was ‘Screening the city’, which focused on how cities can be brought to life by new media technologies and how people leave and use their own data in the [...]

A thirteen-year-old child walks into the music classroom and recommends the guitar teacher a song of an independent, French punk band. The teacher listens to the song on YouTube and concludes that it is a bit too fast. The teacher puts the song in a program to slow the tempo down and records a movie [...]

You have probably already seen them and maybe you have not even noticed them. Some people describe them as ‘trash’, as ‘gosh awful bad’, as ‘YouTube spam’, and others might describe them as ‘(amateur) art’. A more neutral way to describe them is: mash-up or remix video’s. While opinions about the quality of these audiovisual [...]

I want you to think back to the time you moved to the neighborhood you currently live in. Was it a difficult move? Hard to adjust and find libraries, cafes, and parks near you? Of course it was! I want to briefly introduce you to the NYC Neighborhood Explorer, a data visualization tool, that I [...]

During the late-1990s newspapers began to move onto the Internet en masse, giving rise to the question whether these digital immigrants would adapt to the new world of the internet and make full use of the opportunities offered by the new medium. The incorporation of features specific to the web into their sites appeared to [...]

In March of this year, Liam Stacey (a Biology student at Swansea University in Wales) took to twitter after the footballer Fabrice Muamba collapsed during the middle of a match, the result of a cardiac arrest. The game in question was the quarter final of the FA Cup and involved Muamba’s own team (Bolton Wanderers) [...]

The KLM Open 2012, also known as The Dutch Open, is a famous golf tournament at the golfclub in Hilversum. Golfers from all over the world come to our little country to play golf and win fantastic prices. This year they are introducing a new kind of new media for their tournament. The past few [...]

The idea that the world is confined with boarders and barriers is slowly evolving to an open space during this globalizing age, without for example passport controls on the ground in the EU. The utopian idea of the world and its surroundings mainly found in Science Fiction movies is gradually turning into a non-fiction world. [...]