Stories in Digital Media

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.

http://www.henryjenkins.org/

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.

April 18th, 2009 @ Caligari Theater in Wiesbaden

We will explore new approaches that are being developed to confront the flood of information and transform it into useful knowledge

Speakers will be Aaron Koblin (made that Radiohead music video), Sebastian Oschatz from MESO and others.

Tickets for students are 40€. Drop me a line if you want to join so that we can order tickets together (it’s a cinema anyway).

Digital Media rocks!

A nice link:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/dmal

and a nice “workshop” with videos:

http://workshop.softwarestudies.com/

Hi, sometime without sharing something here but currently my thesis work consumes all my time.

Machinic language, I arrived to this blog [Social fiction] because of my research about machinic and assemblege theories.

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I´ve got a question at the back of my head since a while.

To sum up shortly, I get rid of the common definition of “media” in the journalistic/advertising way. Web 2.0 is not my playground. Flickr, facebook and all of the other “social” web services might be fun, but every child will abandon it´s favorite toy (Google Chrome) if it gets bored or hurt by it (Privacy Concerns Over Google Chrome’s “Omnibox”), or ?

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Kansas State Dr. Michael Wesch gives a wonderful retrospect on the YouTube phenomenon. “55 Minutes, 33 Seconds Well Spent”. via Data Mining

When: Tue 8 July, 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Where: ZIMT (Flughafenallee 10), room 122

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Finally, after some minor updates and refinements the official web site for the previous master project at Hochschule Bremerhaven (a.k.a University of applied sciences Bremerhaven) is ready.

The Audiovisual Compendium of Film Terminology (ACT!) is an outcome of throughout research, compilation and presentation of film language terms that build the grounds of classical film-making. ACT! compendium features six main categories: Photography, Cinematography, Mise-en-scene, Editing, Sound, and style.

It is built as a comprehensive package, which includes state-of-the-art high definition discs (HD DVD and Blu-ray), a standard DVD, a paper-based glossary manual and supplementary disc navigation map for 219 terms.

All are invited to visit this project on: http://act-project.de/

ACT!, Master in Digital Media. Hochschule Bremerhaven 2007/2008.

2 things come up in our studies very often, which I want to emphasize here today: presentations and learning.

PRESENTATIONS:

There are two people, I want to introduce you to and whom you should look at and take into consideration whenever you do presentations and visualizations.

Their names are Edward Tufte and Garr Reynolds.

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Nobody really believes anymore that anything in the world could have a definite and precise date when it started. As soon as we define a phenomenon as “new” by giving it a name, and talking about it in particular ways, we discover its pre-cursors.

Digital media need digital technology to be what they are. Digital technology is more or less bound to the existence of digital computers. Digital technology is algorithmic technology. That’s a funny technology, as you know: it is more immaterial than it is material. That is to say, digital technology is of semiotic kind.

Once this was discovered in the late 1980s, it dawned upon some of the early contributors to what is often called »computer art« that computer graphics is the field that later spawned digital media. This is so because computer graphics deals with the contradiction of aesthetics and algorithmics.

So digital media had its first phase between 1963 and 1968. Again that year!