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Oli Card and EuroPrix
Friday, 17 October, 2008 - 17:50
Oli Card, who garduated from the BA this year, has been nominated for an award at EUROPRIX.
Oli's Major Project, EVERLAST: Prince Alec and the Black Dragon is a light-hearted 3D platform action-adventure game, made as a stand-alone application for Apple Mac.
EVERLAST has been nominated for the Europrix Multimedia Awards 2008.
To find out more about the festival and other nominations, go to the EUROPRIX website, and check out Oli's work at his website too!
Pixel Pier: BAIMP 2008 Show!
Hi all,
On behalf of the final year Interactive Students,
We would like to take this opportunity to extend to you an invitation to our graduation show.
The show, which is called Pixel Pier, will be taking place both in Bournemouth and in London.
We start in Bournemouth this Saturday 31st in Weymouth House where we will be showcasing our impressive work. Then we move onto our gala event in London on Monday 2nd and Tuesday 3rd at the Rich Mix studios in Bethnal Green. This is sure to be a stunning event not to be missed!
Download our invitation...
For more information contact info@pixelpier.co.uk or visit http://www.pixelpier.co.uk
We look forward to seeing you!
New Blood awards for Media School finalists
Saturday, 30 June, 2007 - 13:08
D&AD recognise BU Interactive Media Production students with New Blood awards.
Two finalists from BU's BA Interactive Media Production programme have been awarded New Blood awards at this year's D&AD exhibition.
Chris Herring and Tom Schrimshaw were both selected from over 2000 exhibitors for their Major Projects in the Congress show at Old Billingsgate. The D&AD New Blood Exhibition uncovers the best new creative graduates from the UK and around the world, showcasing advertising, graphic design, digital media, illustration, photography, packaging, product design and communication arts.
'Douteki' by Tom Schrimshaw is a 3D game with a novel interaction design. The player controls the main character 'Oshi' through a fiendishly constructed obstacle course consisting of icy paths, hazardous jumps, falling giant acorns, speeding cars, and breakable walls. The object is to get Oshi home by using their voice to move him. They can shout to make Oshi move quickly or whisper to move slowly yet accurately.
On his project Tom said, "It's about exploring different forms and types of gestural control - it's great to break free from the mouse and keyboard and work with new kinds of interaction. I get a great reaction when people play it - it's just a new way of approaching the design."
The D&AD New Blood award is a great recognition of innovative projects: "I was pretty surprised," said Tom. "It's a great prospect to show off my work, and see what other people are doing and see the standard of production. Winning the award makes me realise I'm doing a good job and it'll push me to do more."
Chris Herring's project, 'Ruled by Secrecy', is an alternate reality game (ARG), for which he designed a series of mobile phone games and supporting websites, creating an espionage thriller and blurring the distinction between the game world and reality. The player has to solve puzzles, decode encryptions and piece together clues in order to uncover a conspiracy narrative.
Chris said: "It was out of the blue! It's a great way to end such a lot of hard work on my project. D&AD has been a great chance to make contacts in industry, meet loads of creative people from around the world, both visiting and exhibiting, and also to get new ideas. The quality of work here is mind-blowing, so it's really exciting to get an award."
The IMP students have already had great success with their iheartplay exhibition at Free Range, Brick Lane earlier in June and their work continues to impress visitors from industry.
Related Links:
Tom Schrimshaw's Douteki
Chris Herring's Ruled By Secrecy
BA Interactive Media Production
Interactive Media Production Blog
Iheartplay
D&AD
Let's Kill Music
Saturday, 09 June, 2007 - 14:34
Marc Hibbins and Pete Thomas, aka Let's Kill Music! and finalists from this year's BAIMP cohort take over BBC 6 Music on SUNDAY 10th June at 8pm-10pm hosting an hour show for Listener's 6 Mix.
from the press release:
[Something about expecting massive indie and electro tunes to make you dance and stuff]
Just listen cos (surprisingly) neither of us have been on national radio before so wait for stupid mistakes and stutters being made cos we're bricking it :(
THEN VOTE!
We go head-to-head with some kids from Brighton I think.. Represent!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/
http://www.myspace.com/lkm_bournemouth
I Heart Play - BAIMP 2007 Grad Show
Thursday, 07 June, 2007 - 02:18
The 2007 BAIMP Grad Show is open! This show consists of this year's finalists' major projects, the culmination of their hard work and dedication, and their talent and diversity. Come see!
From the press release:
"iheartplay is the New Media Showcase of Bournemouth University's esteemed Interactive Media Production course. We intend to display the emergent diversity of new media design and development from mashiups and social networks, installations, participatory media and viral marketing, to interactive narratives, educational tools and games."
See iheartplay.com for more details...
Thur 7th June - Mon 11th June 2007
10am Til 7pm
(Thursday - Special Invite Only
6pm Til Late)
Dray Walk Gallery
The Old Truman Brewery
Brick Lane
London
E1
Transmediale exhibition - Podcast 3
Sunday, 04 February, 2007 - 19:42
Our third podcast from Transmediale.07 in Berlin. On the eve of leaving we wrap up some of the video installations and keynotes from the art and digital culture festival.
Proof of Life, Herman Asselberghs
Roots, Roman Kirschner
Against God By Water Pistol, Moon Na
The previous three entries also have some video and descriptions of the pieces we discuss if you want visual stimulation to reinforce the delights of the commentary from Mark, James, Claudia and Joe.
Transmediale 07, Berlin: Unfinish: Roots
Sunday, 04 February, 2007 - 00:14
Roots
Roman Kirschner
'Roots' is based on the model of a chemical computer coneived by Gordon Pask in the early 1950s.
View our video of 'Roots'...View>
Transmediale 07, Berlin: Unfinish: Against God By Water Pistol
Sunday, 04 February, 2007 - 00:10
Against God By Water Pistol
Moon Na
'Against God By Water Pistol' is a strong statement about not accepting given values, including the force of gravity, and a poetical defiance concerning one's place in the world.
View our video of 'Against God By Water Pistol'...View>
Transmediale 07, Berlin: Unfinish: Proof of Life
Sunday, 04 February, 2007 - 00:04
Proof Of Life
Herman Asselberghs
'Proof of Life' is a sound movie with empty images which testify to their own, problematic redundancy.
View our video of 'Proof of Life'...View>
Unfinished Cities: Transmediale.07, Berlin
Saturday, 03 February, 2007 - 23:01
Unfinished Cities: a keynote with presentations from Orhan Esen, author of Self-Service Cities: Istanbul and AbduoMaliq Simone, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College. In keeping with the premise of this year's Transmediale theme of Unfinish they discussed aspects of the modern city and the tensions between formal and informal space, cities as works in progress or as 'finished' environments, and contrasts between urban cultures in Europe, the near East and Africa.
Orhan Esen presented a history he had constructed about the development of gated communities in Istanbul - specifically the North-Western development at Gokturk. Not only have gated communities arisen as a form of pre-built (and hence pre-finished) environment as a bulwark against the ephemeral nature of the city, but they arise as part of a substitution for failed ideologies. The informal city is rejected by middle classes who wish to aspire, and yet in places like Gokturk, members of gated community nevertheless are forced into contact with the 'old villagers' in order to engage in commerce. Places in gated communities are aggressively marketed using discourses of inner peace and a return to nature to attract those alienated from modernity; meanwhile applicants undergo a mutual interview process - it is not possible just to purchase apartments and houses in these communities - you must be 'negotiated into' the culture of the community you wish to enter, ensuring you find yourself among people who share your values, tastes and aspirations. The "excluding city" is a neo-liberal ideal.
AbdouMaliq Simone did not dwell on detail as did Esen, but spoke rather poetically, in the context of Urban Europe and Urban Africa, about the necessary hybridity of the city, pointing out that people will live anywhere regardless of risk if they have to in a post-colonial world... but against this is the very colonial sense of urban intensification and non-integration. The mobile and the immigrant populations enter into wilful anonymities, where 'misrecognition' is desirable, rather than to be avoided. "The poor and the strange must never stop proving their innocence". Simone talks about the technologies which turn every shop-front into a monument, and which introduce heterogenities into the urban spaces, but which also destabilise the environemnt and the social relationships within. There is a constant process of change, in which temporaneities and instability dominate. We must see possibilities, rather than simply condemn cities for their problems.
Transmediale.07 Jan-Peter Sonntag - Borders and the Infinite
Saturday, 03 February, 2007 - 21:42
Jan-Peter E. R. Sonntag's presentation, Borders and the Infinite, was unusual in that he sat, mostly motionless on stage, and did not speak until the end of the session. Sonntag is an artist and composer, whose recent work concentrates on electricity research, video, installations and performance, but his presentation was profoundly about the sound as a form, phenomenon and 'fluid' medium.
His presentation began with a prerecorded female voice reading, we assume, Sonntag's own words, acknowledging that those words, written one month before, served to draw attention to the gaps in space and time that media open up and close down. Interstices remained a constant theme in a presentation which touched on the relation of sound to the body, Einsteinian relativity (again), and misapprehensions of Walter Benjamin and the Aura, and an acknowledgement of John Cage's attention to the musical pause.
Sonntag's sat for 55 minutes during his presentation, isolated on the panel, occasionally showing his enjoyment of the malaprops his voice artists committed, and which he evidently left in as a pleasure of the nature of human sound and breath, rather than deliver a sanitised production. Significantly his presentation argued that art need have no purpose - has no purpose - can be meant not to mean. An interesting performance.
Transmediale Interactive Art - Podcast 2
Saturday, 03 February, 2007 - 01:42
Our second podcast from Transmediale.07 in Berlin. Even though it's late at night and its been an action-packed day, we've recorded our thoughts on three of the pieces of interactive art we encountered in the exhibition hall.
Taken, David Rokeby
Death Before Disco, Herwig Weiser
Random Screen, Aram Bartholl
The previous three entries also have some video and descriptions of the pieces we discuss if you want visual stimulation to reinforce the delights of the commentary from Mark, James, Claudia and Joe.
Arthur Kroker - Born Again Ideology
Saturday, 03 February, 2007 - 01:02
Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory and Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. Co-editor of CTheory and Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (www.pactac.net).
Today he gave a keynote lecture at Transmediale.07 in Berlin based on his latest book, Born Again Ideology. His talk examined the rise of the technocratic society, and its intersection with the rise of religion and the resurgence of God, notwithstanding His long-proclaimed death.
This podcast records the fascinating talk he gave.
We also managed to interview him after his keynote speech. To hear the podcast of our interview with Kroker...Click here>
Vive la revolution!
Tuesday, 30 January, 2007 - 06:39
Every so often the intertubes throws up something remarkable that blows my mind. In My Language is a video posted to YouTube by silentmiaow, who is autistic, about her 'native language'. She describes it as being "about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not." It's one of the most beautiful, profound, mind-expanding things I've seen for a long sore time.
I also really like the idea of gradually repoducing Franz Kafka's diaries as a blog And I also really like a blog where you can write your letter to the internet.
Those of you who are up on your media studies will be aware that we live a purgatorial post-structuralist hegemony. While Derrida might have been breaking molds in 1968, now it is the law that there, um, is no law. Imagine my joyful cackling ironic mirth, therefore, when I read that a History department has banned students from citing Wikipedia. Vive la revolution!
Fornicate with your actual genitals
Tuesday, 23 January, 2007 - 11:34
Following the enormous success of Second Life which creates such an uncanny sense of the virtually real, now comes the successor - the uncannily really real. Check out first life. "What's this body thing, and what do I do with the dangly bits?"
Aside from that, this seems to have been the week that everyone wanted to know, now that the 'user-generated-content honeymoon' is over, how media participation is going to legitimise itself by monetising. It's the law, you see. None of us, of course, would do anything except for a profit motive. I mean, surely when you're talking to your friends, you always have in the back of your mind, "what's in it for me? Where's the payback?" When you go for a stroll in the sunshine, don't you just wish someone would pay you to do it? And of course, all of us secretly want to be porn-stars, don't we? Fornicating with our actual genitals for hard cash.
Awesome 2007
Tuesday, 16 January, 2007 - 08:01
I can't draw which is why I think these things are awesome: sketch Martin Luther King and a daily monster.
I had to stay up all night listening to the best of Bootie 2006, because it's totally awesome, and, I might add, all the better because it totally frigging flaunts copyright law.
And Magnatune is awesome because they have a sensible commercial model for distributing music in the age of the internet which doesn't attempt to criminalise their music-lovers.
Lawyers defending Gitmo prisoners are totally awesome because it's an awesome thing to do with youtube. As is this parody of this.
Guerilla artists projecting onto american suburban buildings images of dead iraqis is awesome because it means something.
And this piece of streetart is awesome just because waking up to find someone painted the town with their lovesong to you is an amazing thing.
Yea for awesome things!
Grad show - call for suggestions
Monday, 18 December, 2006 - 06:46
Hi guys,
We are still looking for suggestions for the grad show title and branding. We are going to organise a small brainstorming session/focus group in the second week back from Christmas. If people have suggestions or design ideas for the title and branding, or if you want to be involved in the focus group, please let us know over the holidays.
Currently we have the idea of a "Playground" theme; last year they went with the brand "Grow".
Send suggestions or ideas to impshow2007@yahoo.co.uk.
Many Thanks, The Degree Show Committee :)
unprofessional and without redress
Monday, 04 December, 2006 - 09:01
Continuing last week's theme of revenge, it turns out Bournemouth is a breeding ground for such internet-mediated acts. Okay, so I only saw the one story. A woman defaced and altered the password of her two-timing boyfriend's myspace page so he was unable to remove the words advertising to the world that he was a lying scumbag.
Other than such anti-social, but extremely amusing events, apparently some clever people have counted lots of things up and found that the internet is a 'social' place. Half of us are logging into online communities everyday, and more than two thirds of those are getting involved in things in the offline world as a direct consequence. Well, it's great to know that human beings like talking to each other and doing stuff, but I can't help but wonder why I'm always running into the other half who look at me like I'm a freak when I say that I blog.
Idiot of the week.
Smartlynchmobs
Monday, 27 November, 2006 - 08:35
Internet mobs that verge on revenge appear to be proliferating. Earlier in the year there was laptopguy who bought a duff laptop on ebay, and after the seller blew off his complaints, posted the seller's details all over a blog, including the surreptitious photos taken of people's legs that were left on the hard drive. Then there was the guy who took umbrage at the depiction of him at dontdatehimgirl.com.
This week, not only did some students post their mobile movies of their less-than-favourite tutor on YouTube, but a crowd of blog-readers are closing in on one Ian Goldman, who apparently (ahem... allegedly) ran over a cyclist's bike in NYC and drove off. All it took was one plate number and a blog-post, and now he's heading for some street-justice...
What's the line between citizen-journalism and a lynchmob?
Speaking of which, I'm u-turning on my hitherto contempt for stringent copyright laws if it means being flooded with Cliff Richard recordings in 2008.
Constituo, ergo sum
Grad Show 2007
Saturday, 25 November, 2006 - 15:53
BAIMP3 students are planning an exhibition in Shoreditch in June 2007, and creating a website which will showcase student work as it develops. Watch this space for more info!
This blog will fuel a political crisis
Monday, 20 November, 2006 - 03:54
Because I'm always banging on about it, and I don't want to seem a dullard, I've decided that this week I won't mention the fact that Universal Music Group have decided to go to war with News-Corp and the iPod, or that China appears to be shutting down Wikipedia again, or that in a lovely piece of irony, No 10 launch online petition facilities while claiming at the same time that the web is damaging public discourse in what appears to be a deliberate attempt to encourage 'anti-establishment' types to use the internet to slag politicians off for being mealy-mouthed whinging two-faced cynical manipulative self-serving vainglorious slippery fork-tongued double-speaking reactionary morons. Why anyone would suggest that I have no idea.
So instead I decided to list some things that rock. The Disneyfied mash-up of the Communist Manifesto rocks; Marco Guerra & Yasmina Alaoui's body art rocks; thingpart's comic rocks; the Owl music discovery engine rocks; a jedi interstellar day of tolerance would definately rock; brain-powered computer interfaces rock; Philip Toledano's photos of gamers rock; and Buffy fan-fiction rocks in the most non-obvious, bidet-of-evil way.
Happy Birthday Internet. Old enough to have sex.
I am in ur website, writin ur nooz
Monday, 13 November, 2006 - 08:38
Scarcely a week goes by in which I don't indulge my habit of RIAA-bashing. Last week's hiatus has left me deleriosus tremenissima... SO:
MS release the Zune; Universal demand protection money, in return for which they promise not to break MS's legs; MS capitulates like a big cry-baby. True fact: as well as running a protection racket, the mafioso at Universal rule with the iron hand of intimidation, knee-cap poor people, and also eat babies.
Reporters Without Borders named enemies of the Internet. Not Spam, balkanisation, net-non-neutrality, nor even the fact that everything on Wikipedia is rubbish. No, they were concerned with the trifling matter of free-speech under threat in 13 states. Fortunately, we can rest assured that the UK is protecting us from ourselves by criminalising ownsership of packets of data they don't like.
Random things you need to know: self-immolation protest goes largely unnoticed, but the guy's website is a profoundly fascinating thing; teach yourself compassion; and a funny internet meme is in my head, rotting my neurons.
myNews
Monday, 30 October, 2006 - 07:53
Jeff Jarvis writes this week that newspapers are in free-fall. The Wall Street Journal breaks the jaw-dropping, earth-shattering news that:
"The newspaper industry has been struggling with steep declines in print-advertising revenue and declining circulation amid competition from the Internet and other media."
Well, nothing gets past them. Jarvis's advice is to make news free and drive readerships online. What does the news look like when it's in free-fall? Maybe the Sun knows.
There's a problem with moving online, of course. Sooner or later, someone will say 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us'. IBM's latest lawsuit against Amazon is an attempt to enforce a patent which covers 'any web page that has an advertisement in one spot and some information in another.' By the way the latest trendy piece of activism to float through consumer space is to mark DRM-crippled products on Amazon with the defectivebydesign tag.
Broadband internet access is becoming the communication service people can least live without. Unfortunately, politicians have no grasp of technology. This complaint declines in significance if you accept Lessig's argument that most policymakers are in hock to their financial backers. Which is why its important that in this week of debate about the governance of the internet, there are organisations putting free expression on the agenda; and undermining efforts to censor bloggers; and allowing citizens to report on human rights.
Free Halloween music here and here.
newsTube
Monday, 23 October, 2006 - 09:22
If you could free anything from copyright jail, what would it be?
Fairly predictably the talk of the week was the continuing GooTube roadshow. Are they planning to expand into TV advertising? Why did they foreclose their checkout service on a very popular vlogger who doesn't host his videos on YouTube? Is it a new dawn for copyright 'tolerance'?
Well, maybe not. Pulling 30,000 videos may just be the start of a long strategic war between Google and the content-kings, who are already pursuing the smaller players. Universal giveth and Universal taketh away.
While p2p may be starting to be considered by the content industries as an option, they are not tolerating any services which don't play ball, so Visa has withdrawn its service from AllOfMP3, who say they will be moving to an advertising model. Even fabric makers are getting in on the copyright bubble.
The internet is of course a dangerous lawless place. Wired caught sexual predators on myspace using their home-brewed bots; internet addiction (which is a social evil, while TV addiction is kind of okay, really) is on the rise; the internet turns people into terrorists; even the FBI can't help breaking the law, breaking the law.
So, what we probably need is more regulation; more laws about video content; licenses in order to make video; more litigation; more constraints on our consumer rights; and of course, more tax.
Can you tax badgers?
GooNews
Monday, 16 October, 2006 - 09:30
As ever more aspects of our real lives venture into virtuality, growing pains are generated. Second Life was infected by grey goo - self-replicating particles - which were in danger of creating a virtual apocalypse. As the makers fought to address the issues, odd things occurred, such as people's clothing going missing. Your eyes are like, um, error messages.
Maybe fixing this stuff will get easier when we can get properly wired into the matrix. It has, however, been a bad week for people trying to browbeat the gaming industry with legislation and lawsuits. Apparently, 9 out of 10 attempts by US states to control the sale of games to minors has failed in the courts. The only case in which it has not been challenged is where the law relates to sexual content. Violent content, however, keeps slipping through the wannabe-lawmakers' net.
Pursuers of pirates fared no better. The RIAA's bully tactics, which have previously backfired on them, are getting ever more bogged down as their victims decide to actually call them on their evidence. An agog world also had to wash its pants after a Disney exec said something sensible. Unlike the lawyer whose bright idea was to copyright recipes.
China is - partly - unblocking Wikipedia. While you may think this a triumph of Wikipedia's brave stance of refusing to censor itself that has won out against the forces of tyranny, it could just as easily be because Wikipedia is all made-up stuff. Or your notions of freedom and tyranny are socially constructed ideological positions which will be washed away in a future wave of Chinese cultural imperialism.
When we do finally succumb to a world of grey goo and totalitarian bliss, we'll surely not want to be reminded of our hedonistic past, least of all the daily lives of 21st century Britons?
Finally, here's fine evidence that allowing people to mess with your copyrighted material is a good thing.
The CEMPle News Project
Monday, 09 October, 2006 - 08:58
This article's name is watching its p's and q's.
Myspace - that wild west of teen culture, and mainstream media's paedophiliac bogeyman - is actually full of old people. More than half of myspace's users are over 35 which as we all know means that they're dodging coffins. Turns out the kids are elsewhere - and they're not on email either, which is apparently waaay to slow. See, all these old-fashioned 35+ folks, writing emails, choosing their words carefully, channeling the aura of meaningful personal communication - fuddy-duddies. They need to get with it. Telepathy is the thing. Or at least teleportation.
Interwebworld was also surprised to discover that nearly two thirds of online gamers are actually girls. Yes, real girls, not Bay area men pretending to be Japanese Geishas. An interesting observation was made that few of them are playing violent shoot-em-up games. How extraordinary. So if you want to meet real women, get on the internet, of course.
Robert Anton Wilson, god of conspiracy novels, and author of the bright idea of putting LSD into the water supply, is ill, getting worse, and desperately short of cash - or he was. An appeal started off by Douglas Rushkoff and spread by Slashdot and BoingBoing has resulted in kindly conspiracists everywhere ponying up. At last count RAW had over $65K to see him through his final (Illuminati-instigated) exit.
Fox reacted to Mark Foley's revelations by switching him over to the democrat party. Re-writing history can be fun, folks. See their other misallocated allegiances here.
Google. Once they used to do one thing and do it better than everyone else. Now they want to do everything better than everyone else. There's the Google Book Search, which turns out is helping indie publishers to sell books. There's the court case regarding the legality of their book search, in which they're demanding everyone come along and join in. There's Google's new Code search, which will allegedly help hackers find vulnerable websites. There's the Google Literacy Project, which is aimed at helping poeple to be more ,er, litter8. Then the rumours that they'll acquire Youtube for $1.6B. And there's even the bit where Google tells you whether politicians are lying are not. Next up: the Google 'state-the-obvious' project?
Finally my favourite story of the week was the man campaigning (during Banned Books week) to ban a book because it had bad language. The book in question is a sci-fi novel which warns against erosion of freedom of speech and depicts futuristic book-burnings.
newsPod
Monday, 02 October, 2006 - 23:34
This week's article's name is brought to you with a flagrant disregard for Apple's latest folly.
Everywhere on the internet in the past week has been feeding on the latest study from Pew Internet. Whether it's the prognosis on how we consume political news, or how teens think email is old hat, the study is fascinating reading, especially the notion that there will emerge a sub-class of 'refuse-niks' who want to disengage from the digital world.
Divergent views of the future of the 'commons' also emerged: Brazil has warned the WIPO about their commerce-centric view of intellectual property; Brian O'Hanlon worries that the commons may not work, and the British Library has released a manifesto setting out the issues as they see them as copyright restrictions endanger their archives surviving, and DRM fails to distinguish between piracy and 'fair dealings'.
Games make us violent, according to stupid people everywhere. How many hours before the latest shooting in the US is linked to a popular pastime which steals broadcast audiences?
And, of course, Apple wants to trademark the word 'pod'. Pay them to talk about how peas grow, watch them take a cut from sci-fi movie royalties retrospectively, and ask them permission to post audio files on the web. Or not
Forest Grove
Wednesday, 31 May, 2006 - 19:48
This morning I discovered Forest Grove. I was supposed to be getting my haircut, but an hour-and-a-hooked-half later I was still exploring Forest Grove.
It uses such simple yet effective techniques to create an absorbing and immersive story-telling experience. Sometimes it reminded me of La Jetee, but at others it used innovative montage ideas I've never seen used before. It has elements of concrete poetry, minimalist animation, really effective sound effects, an original score, and, oh everything.
Not sure why I haven't seen this sooner since it was featured in last year's Sundance festival.
It's fab, so you should look at it, so I wrote this post.
Via We Make Money Not Art
The experimental wing of political philosophy
Saturday, 20 May, 2006 - 10:39
Because I've been, as it were, chewing the carpet at this Dissertation time of year, it's taken me a while to get caught up. So: back in March, O'Reilly had their Emerging Technology conference, at which all sorts of nuggets were unearthed, not the least of which was Clay Shirky's proposal that technologists are the experimental wing of political philosophy.
This isn't a new idea: researchers in cyberspace have long argued that new technologies offer bright new hopes for our identities, our social relationships and our political structures; MUDs which hardwire in different social models have been used to explore the merits of various political economies; more recently collaborative tools have highlighted the tensions between elitist models of gate-keeping versus socially constructed knowledge.
Shirky frames the debate by invoking Hobbes and Rousseau; when we design digital spaces where people can produce and consume content, we are testing out their models of the world. When we foreground the content of a few people, and stow away the heavily moderated user-contributed content one or more click away, we are using the Hobbes model, in which the benign dictator guards against the white noise of anarchy. But when the content really is just user-contributed content, when the users really are the content, Rousseau's romantic liberalism can be observed in the wild.
So what do we want? The rarified air of the elite, lifting the rest of us out of our mire? Or the undifferentiated masses producing the low hum of mediocrity?
We Media and the great blogging hoax
Thursday, 04 May, 2006 - 23:38
I'm gutted because I can't make it to Helen Boaden's guest lecture at BU. Earlier this week she was at the We Media conference in London, which I've read about from the following (blog) sources:
Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine
Bobbie Johnson
Rachel from North London
PaidContent
Strange Attractor
- all these sources paint a slightly different picture than that found at the BBC's blog about the event
The bloggers (my, um... news source for this event) complain that the event emanated a silo, us-vs-them atmosphere. They wonder why Helen only reads the blogs of professional journalists. They report that Helen expects a big blogging hoax to upset what she calls the bloggers' 'steamrolling'.
This sounds kind of similar to The Guardian piece a couple of weeks ago, in which they happily reported that the blogosphere exerts 'a disproportionate influence'. Disproportionate to what? A publication produced by a small bunch of 'professionals'?
The BBC blogger reports, however, that Helen's contribution was about objectivity:
“Witness accounts do not necessary give you an objective factual picture. They give you the truth as I see it,” she said.
“The role of journalism is to sift facts and give you a truthful and factual picture.”
This sounds to me like another way of saying the job of a journalist is to intermediate many different viewpoints - unless she really believes that objectivity is something that really exists?
Which brings me to the crux: isn't the rise of citizen journalism, participatory media and blogging about disintermediation, and isn't that the real reason that the mainstream media are so threatened? I can do my own intermediation now, thanks very much. Which means that rather than 'objectivity', the only benefit mainstream media give me now is convenience?
Here's some intermediation for you: this week BBC News online has been reporting the results of a survey it commissioned which show that a) people trust the media more than governments, b) people may or may not trust blogs, and c) young people trust internet sources.
So here's the ground-breaking news: people trust the media more than professional equivocators; mainstream media sources are unable to evaluate blogs 'objectively'; and future generations will be wired, not couched.
As I've said before, the BBC says nice things about networked participatory media; but as Suw Charman says: "Citizen journalism is not just about a few comments and a few photos from Buncefield."
This week: Retro Contrafabulation
Monday, 27 March, 2006 - 08:11
This article's name is brought to by the Phony Rush Album Name Generator.
The Open University has decided to open up its courseware into the public domain, as MIT did 5 years ago. At the time, MIT president Charles vest said:
"OpenCourseWare combines two things: the traditional openness and outreach and democratizing influence of American education and the ability of the Web to make vast amounts of information instantly available."
Britannica don't agree. Back in December, The Register and Wikipedia were involved in a war over the quality of the entries in Wikipedia. Most people were sympathetic to Wikipedia, taking the line that it was never intended to be the only, authoritative source for information - more a gateway, while people like Dave Winer sided with the Register, perhaps because they had had personal issues with information about them on Wikipedia. Nature then did an analysis which seemed to close off the debate, showing that Wikipedia actually stood up very well to Britannica's online encyclopedia.
Britannica have now fought back, arguing that Nature's study was flawed. Who do you believe? The peer-reviewed journal which this month has run an open-access edition, dedicated to the future of computing, freely available on the internet; or a closed silo trying to cling to its top-down model of expert didacticism?
Ward Cunningham, creator of the wiki, is also arguing that collaborative working patterns are only just beginning to demonstrate their full potential, while Nature runs a story by Verner Vinge in which he calls the Internet 'The creativity machine'.
Even the US government seems to have adopted the principles of open source collaboration in its effort to translate all the Iraqi documents it has seized. Professor Brian Martin argues that participatory media are the only way forward in the face of an inherently undemocratic mass media. The BBC has released an archive of wildlife footage under a creative commons license in the Open Earth Archive. And Tim Berners-Lee has spoken out against the restrictive practices of software patents, emphasising again that royalty-free developments are the only way to build the kinds of infrastructure we need.
And finally, Howard Rheingold's latest venture is the Cooperative Commons blog, an excellent campaign to disseminate collaborative practices, including the argument that open source is a political as well as a technological and economic model.
This week: The Machine Gun of Reasoned Discussion
Saturday, 18 March, 2006 - 14:14
This article's name is brought to you by the Unitarian Jihad Generator
You'll be pleased to know that my embargoes have finally been lifted, so I can bring you the hottest news around.
Web2.0 is really coming of age, offering all the services you could possibly hope for - and what's more, you can do it too. Here's a really useful service, giving you back control over your personal networking - I strongly recommend you read the FAQ. Need more proactive mechanisms for your relationship management? Here's the tool for you.
If you're thinking of your own web2.0 startup, here's some basic pointers, distilled from the experience of those in the know. And here's a new startup that you can get involved in right now!
I'm also pleased to bring you news of Apple's latest ventures - here's the new addition to the iPod range, and this development is certain to transform the way we consume our media.
Finally a word on how blogging is transforming our access to heteroglossic discourses, in ways that will fundamentally change the social and political relations which connect us all and differentiate the individual from the state. Get access to voices previously inaccessible, and marvel at the profundity. And eat spam.
This week: Noah, The Logo Weenie
Friday, 03 March, 2006 - 19:19
This article's name is brought to you by the word 'news' and the Nerd Name Generator.
In 1988 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published their withering analysis of how media-content gets made: The Propaganda Model. The kinds of things that 'can be said' in the media are determined through 5 filters: who owns the media; which sponsors subsidise the producers; the kind of sources that can be regarded as 'authoritative'; the 'flak' that content may attract; and finally, the kind of ideological winds that are blowing at any given time.
It has mostly been sidelined and criticised since then; people arguing that it's just a 'conspiracy theory' (though the authors never claim a conscious effort at deceit), that it's too deterministic (so that's any logical theories ever proposed out of the window then), that it's unscientific (like, yeah, mainstream media theory is the very model of scientific enquiry), or it's just written off as the polemic of 'activists' (rather like how people who think the status quo is crap get conveniently labelled as anarchists, as though that somehow dispenses with their arguments).
On BBC Newsnight, 24 Feb, a package was aired in which file-sharing was described as theft, and use of Bittorrent lumped in with paedophilia and terrorism. Adam Livingstone, Producer of BBC Newsnight, in a prickly, snide little column on the BBC News website (I guess he considers it as an apology), has retracted the claim, and hinted at the idea that mainstream media are scared of the internet and so consistently attempt to demonise it. It would have been more persuasive if his column hadn't been dripping with sarcasm and obvious irritation at the, erm, 'torrent' of criticism the BBC's internet presence has exposed him to.
Meanwhile, news broadcasts covering Daniel Gonzales, the guy currently accused of murdering 4 people in his desire to become a Freddie-Krueger type serial killer, have not failed to report the prosecutions' characterisation of Gonzales as someone who spent a lot of time playing video games - couched amongst other labels such as 'loner', 'no friends', 'no girlfriend', 'isolated'.
And they wonder why 'fewer young people are watching TV' I guess they're all on the internet planning 'paedo-terror' and contemplating their next series of murders as they gaze moronically into video games.
Whose Propaganda Model looks stupid now?
Albumart.org
Saturday, 25 February, 2006 - 23:35
Mats Staugaard, a student on the MA Interactive Media programme, has produced a web 2.0 style tool which allows you to easily find album art for your digital music collection - albumart.org. Albumart.org has been getting great feedback on digg.com.
This cool tool uses the publicly available Amazon API, which makes it a great example of new mashup technologies which do things users want them to do :)
Mats is looking for anyone who can help with translation to other languages - if you have time, help out.
Welcome to Aggie
Saturday, 25 February, 2006 - 23:02
This post marks the launch of the IMP blog and our aggie - that is - an aggregator for our students' content.
Explore the site to find out what our current BAIMP and MAIMe students are working on. And make sure you check back for updates :)
This week: newsr
Saturday, 25 February, 2006 - 16:03
This article's name is brought to you by the word news and the MakeWords domain name generator.
The more perspicacious will notice I have a thing about copyright and corporations who try to wrestle ever more control over it from the public domain. Indeed, it provokes words of gentle admonition, such 'Hey! stop forcing us all to fellate goatboy' - to borrow a (possibly copyrighted) image from the late and wonderful Bill Hicks.
The debate going on this week at WIPO goes to the heart of the matter. While countries like the US are trying to lobby for ever-tougher measures to shrink the public domain, voices like Chile are actually talking some sense: no public domain means no creative resources means no more innovation.
Does the US really want to shrink consumer rights and trample all over fair use? Well, yes. The 'Broadcaster's Treaty' being discussed at WIPO removes all fair use provisions from all internet audio/video casts - even the head of the US' Copyright Office admits the rest of the world totally rejects the proposal. In practice, this measure would mean that anyone wishing to produce audio/video content on the web (eg you and me) would need further permissions (eg from hosting services) to distribute it even though they authored it themselves. Starting up ideas like this internet TV site would be an even bigger colossal pain the arse, and, basically, who would bother? Corporations with money accrued through draconian tactics perhaps?
Does the public domain / fair use really drive innovation? Well aside from all the mashup services coming online every day (which re-use resources provided by third-parties to create new services - think of all the implementations of google-maps) there are entire musical genres which owe their existence to a six-second drum sample.
Does commerce suffer because of the public domain and fair use? Well sure if you think that free viral marketing for these companies hurts them somehow. NBC thinks so, since they slapped a cease-and-desist on YouTube for distributing Saturday Night Live's 'Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia' video, creating an Internet craze increasing the show's flagging profile. Hey you pirates! Stop making our content popular! Apple also thinks so, since it has shut down a message board where people discuss ways they might install Mac OS X, designed for the switch to Intel chipsets, on non-Apple Intel chipsets. So that would be Apple getting it's OS onto more computers, then, which would be, um, bad, cos, like, Apple has such a massive market-share when it comes to operating systems...
And while we're on it, can someone please show me any evidence whatsoever that there is a causal link between piracy and declining sales? I'm a music pirate: I have loads of maxell tapes from when I was nineteen and couldn't afford to buy the latest My Bloody Valentine (etc) album. Of course, if I hadn't had those tapes I would a) not have been a criminal, b) have been entirely ignorant of MBV, c) not spent any money on going to their gigs and d) not spent my first pay-cheque on their back-catalogue. And besides, the industry's lawsuits against p2p networks are on questionable legal ground, anyhow, and, furthermore, if the movie industry wasn't so intent on maximising profit by staggering film releases across the globe, many people watching pirated copies wouldn't need to do so.
Now of course, these corporations and institutions who respect Intellectual Property so much wouldn't dream of invading citizens' privacy or misusing their personal information, would they? Well, um, yes, and yes. The RIAA is trying to use the private data of children in a court case to sue their mother. A Houston Police Chief has suggested installing CCTV in people's homes to counter-act crime. The US DoJ wants search engines to hand over search records, which some argue will set a precedent allowing the identification of individuals and their digital interests.
What's to be done? Play them at their own game, like this Kokomo 16-yr-old who successfully sued his mayor to release his mailing-list. Indeed, teenagers, currently being variously sidelined, suspected and criminalised, are the topic of a number of stories this week. They're 'driving a cultural shift' as they gather in myspace. And they're also gaining valuable social skills in cyberspace. And, oh my god, they're sharing files.
Finally: a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the London Anagrammap - a remix of the iconic LU tube map which replaced all station names with their anagrams. LU immediately slapped - wouldn't you know - a cease-and-desist order on it. Not long after that (and I'd like to posit a causal link here), anagrammaps of the world's underground networks started springing up everywhere - including a copy of the original London version right HERE!
Because anti-piracy measures work, folks.
