Stuff that was probably relevant for the former Digital Media programme in Bremen.
Art and Electronic Media
After last year’s Mark Amerika workshop, there will be another compart workshop – this year with art historian Edward Shanken. It will happen from the 13th until the 17th of July at the OAS @ Linzer Straße in Bremen. Shanken recently published a comprehensive book on electronic art, Art and Electronic Media. Rhizome just published a short review of the book here.
INC was founded by Geert Lovink, a renown media theorist in social critique of network- and ciber-culture. Lovink’s research homes on in the use of media tools and technologies to openly distribute ideas outside of the official channels. He is an internet activist and scholar particularly interested on Tactical Media, as means to achieve participation thus becoming part of the dominant media.
Lovink’s participatory discourse might be partially bounded to that of Jenkins, although each has a cultural perspective absolutely different. As Jenkins’, his view is sympathetic to the mass media, the digital media production tools are for liberation and not instruments for alienation. For Lovink our task as artist, developers, designers, and researchers is to tackle the dominant media in an open dialogue to the free circulation of ideas. For Jenkins that already happens in grass-roots media without the need of artists, designers and so on. Both see the Internet as the plateau that fulfils all the conditions for active media participation.
By the mid 1990s he co-founded the famous mailing list <nettime> a vast repository of discussions in media theory in different languages, most of the key figures in our field(s) are filed there.
Hi, this is my comeback part two.
Hanging around in Internet I visited Lev Manovich website.
Manovich recently published a new book, I guess by now many of you have already put your hands on it and devoured it piece by piece, however to my surprise nobody has posted it here 
. Right now that many are in the process of Master Thesis writing this text, free available online, might be of special interest.
Manovich is one of the most quoted researchers of contemporary media studies and has a particular interest for data mining, and data bases that recently has led him to what he calls the ‘software revolution’.
Below the link to download the book
http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/11/softbook.html
Hi, it’s been a long time since my last post here. And no! I was not dead neither have I forgotten this blog . It was my master thesis you have to blame for my absence. I have to say it was a pleasant time writing my thesis and soon I’ll share it, for now is enough to say: I’m back.
For those who have the pleasure to follow this blog (a handful of enthusiasts) and those who, somehow, missed me (even fewer I’m afraid) I have the following recommendation.
The official weblog of Henry Jenkins, currently one of the most renowned and cited scholars in contemporary media and cultural studies. His main area of research: Fans. He is an enthusiast of participation, appropriation, democratisation, and fandom. If you are about to study phenomena of media such as television series, cult films, and pop-music or the impact of blogs, video sharing, and virtual communities on spreading media content (official and unofficial) then he is definitely a must read.
His books, all available at the Uni-Bremen library: Convergence Culture (2006) and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers (2006), Democracy and new media (2003), and Textual poachers : television fans & participatory culture (1992)
I have to warn you, approach to his writings with special care in order not to become a fan of him in the process, losing as a consequence your critical view.
Enjoy.
Leopard Wallpaper Aurora
Scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey
What you see here is the well-known Apple Wallpaper Aurora, the standard background in Mac OS X Leopard. Yeah, it’s the first one, not the second. The second is a movie still from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s SciFi masterpiece from 1968, roundabout 40 years senior than the Apple wallpaper. I recently watched the movie for the 20th time and I came across this resemblance. (It’s of course the sequence where Dave Bowman “evolves”).
January 28th – February 1st 2009 (Wed–Sun) at the House of World Cultures Berlin
Looking beyond the evolving alarmist scenarios of environmental catastrophe prevalent in the global warming debate, transmediale.09 shifts the focus of this challenge to the broader cultural, societal and philosophical consequences that the collapse of the northern ice barrier reveals. Are we about to reach another historically succinct moment of unavoidable and revolutionary change, a point of no return leading to an unforeseeable global transformation akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago? Will it be a time in which we realise that everything will be different, without knowing how everything will be different?
Early Bird rebates until December 19th.
I am planning to have a trip like in the last time. Contact me (see the authors page) for more info.
That president is so sympathetic that it almost scares me. But it’s also the confirmation and fulfilment of the strategies he pursued during his campaign: running a campaign 2.0.
HI, currently at the Reina sofia museum there is an interesting exhibition called Máquinas&almas, souls&machines, a very appropriate to name to discuss in our digital media times 
. The aim at this exhibition is to explore those blurry areas where art and technology meet and melt, for that purpose they propose us a trip through the work of a generation of people whose pieces marked remarkable milestones in defining limits and positions in new media practice and critique.
Material : a short video about it and a photo gallery here.
