Stories in Digital Media

The lectures started at all universities now and the most of the new students arrived in the master programme as well as in the bachelor degree courses.

There´ll be the master retreat at Verden on November 6th and as I´m an junior in the master programme I´m really looking forward to it.

To give an brief overview: There are 5 projects which will start in the next term, mandatory lectures started already and it´s up to us to form our groups in the next weeks, months. Just have look at the projects page on the official programmes website to retrieve an overview.

So, I´m a parcitipant within the upcoming Serious Games : Entertainment Computing project at the university. Recently I stumbled upon this blog called acagamic.com of an Ph.D. Candidate in the research field of Serious Games. His academic presentations are also online on slideshare . Could be also of interest for the parcitipants of the mobile gaming project at the University of Applied Sciences Bremen ?

Might be the right to time to distribute the url of this blog and to have a look if there´ll be a bit more parcitipation in the future to improve the communication between the different projects and institutions? We´ll see.

In October 1969, a student typed ‘LO’ on a computer – and the internet was born

Unless you are 15 years old or younger, you have lived through the dotcom bubble and bust, the birth of Friends Reunited and Craigslist and eBay and Facebook and Twitter, blogging, the browser wars, Google Earth, filesharing controversies, the transformation of the record industry, political campaigning, activism and campaigning, the media, publishing, consumer banking, the pornography industry, travel agencies, dating and retail; and unless you’re a specialist, you’ve probably only been following the most attention-grabbing developments. Here’s one of countless statistics that are liable to induce feelings akin to vertigo: on New Year’s Day 1994 – only yesterday, in other words – there were an estimated 623 websites. In total. On the whole internet. “This isn’t a matter of ego or crowing,” says Steve Crocker, who was present that day at UCLA in 1969, “but there has not been, in the entire history of mankind, anything that has changed so dramatically as computer communications, in terms of the rate of change.”

It turns out that Charles Bukowski, novelist and poet, famous for reflecting on and out of the american working class, was open to new technologies at least in his later years, if not eager to delve into them.

In general Bukowski kept abreast of new innovations that would further his writing. In a letter to John Martin, his Black Sparrow publisher, Bukowski mentioned the availability of a technology (the Internet) that would allow him to send poems instantly. The speed and ease of new technologies amazed, excited, and inspired him. When he first got a fax machine, Bukowski immediately wrote Martin a fax poem. In late 1992, Bruce Kijewski approached Bukowski with the idea of electronic books. Bukowski was intrigued. He wrote back, “Yes, you have a strange project: electronic books. It might be the future as more and more people find that the computer is such a magic thing: time-saver, charmer, energizer.” Bukowski’s open-mindedness in old age is refreshing, when you consider all the aging writers who fall back and rely on the familiar, be it in technologies of writing or actual writing style.

http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/charles-bukowski-william-burroughs-and-the-computer/

A lot of work has been done lately in terms of facade projection. This is the next big thing. by playmodes @ Ingravid Festival, Spain

Telenoika Audiovisual Mapping @ Ingravid Festival, Figueres 9/2009 [FULL] from Telenoika on Vimeo.

via cdm

What will the web do to content, in terms of… high cost, expensive, time consuming content.
Now we can see where that comes from.

Smooth Zarathustra of Design Stefan Sagmeister held a brilliant note at TED recently. It’s about his sabbaticals and funny and informative. This is the second fantastic video I saw today (actually the third, but the third one does not belong here).

This analysis analog additive re-synthesis project absolutely blew my mind. Imagine approximating every sound with the sublime timbre of a piano. I wonder what that would sound like on an electric organ with multiple keyboards or the likes.