Light as Artistic Medium: Paul Klotz (and the Meaningfulness of Interactive Features in Media Artworks)

Paul Klotz is an applied art engineer and light designer who specializes in interactive light installations for public spaces. By means of light and sound installations which create a feedback loops between the passerby and the installation upon physical interaction with the artwork, he attempts to set up in public spaces artistic zones which captivate, …

Juha Van ‘T Zelfde on the Role of ‘Urban Informatics’ and The ‘Cloud City’ in Urban Redevelopment

Juha Van ‘t Zelfde spoke at the Urban Screens conference in Amsterdam (December 4, 2009) in behalf of VURB, a foundation located in Amsterdam which focuses on policy and design research concerning urban computational systems. His presentation focused on what might be called ‘urban informatics’. VURB endorses the development of ‘urban informatics’ as a potential …

Theo Watson: Start Your Own Graffiti Research Lab!

Theo Watson is one of the members of Graffiti Research Lab, an art group which brings together hacking and graffiti writing into digital graffiti as a form of communication in urban spaces. The organization is based in New York and now has other nodes Mexico, Vienna, and Amsterdam, where Theo is located. The group experiments …

Mettina Veenstra on How Public Screens Can Help Build Social Capital

Mettina Veenstra is principal researcher and coordinator of the theme public screens at Novay Research. Novay is a Dutch research institute for ICT driven innovation. Her presentation at the Urban Screens conference in Amsterdam on the 4th of December this year focused on what public displays can do for public space in terms of stimulating encounters and …

Nanna Verhoeff: Mobile Digital Cartography from Representation to Performance of Space

Nanna Verhoeff, associate professor in the department of Media and Culture studies at Utrecht University, had one of the very few yet very welcomed theoretical presentations at the Urban Screens conference which took place on the 4th of December this year in Amsteram. Her contribution focused in particular on mobile screens (such as mobile phones, PDA’s and GPS …

Social Network Sites as Stages of ‘Dramaturgical Performance’ – Interpretation Sketch

A study of the University of Georgia describes as more likely to be narcissist those Facebook users who have a large number of friends and wallposts, narcissism in this case being defined as an emphasis on self-promotion and quantity of friends. The use of Facebook to emphasize self-promotion, that is considered to be narcissism in …

Book review: “Media Work” by Mark Deuze

As technologies develop, media diversifies its platforms and products, and becomes more and more present and involved in our lives, building barthesian myths around every object surrounding us, which consequently turns our every act: production, purchasing, consumption, etc., into a cultural experience. But the changes that media has been undergoing due to the development of …

Control Rates in User Generated Content: PoliticalBase.com, the Moderated Political Wikipedia

Technological developments, resulting in free user-friendly interface applications, led to the second step in the evolution of the World Wide Web, the Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 reflects a paradigm shift, from the “read web”, another platform of mass communication, whose advantages over the traditional media were in terms of functionality: better storage of large …

PICNIC 08 – “Homophily Can Make You Stupid” by Ethan Zuckerman

In a presentation given yesterday at Picnic for the Bloggers Lab, organized by the European Journalism Centre, Ethan Zuckerman brought up an interesting concept that has quite remotely been discussed over the internet for a while now. Today we are all enjoying this second step of the web evolution, the web 2.0, a read/write space …

Secondary Orality in Microblogging

Orality versus literacy in the history of human consciousness In the book “Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the World”, Walter Ong compares orality and literacy, as defining features of oral cultures (cultures which do not have a system of writing), and “chirographic” cultures respectively (the ones who use alphabetic writing systems). He analyzes the …