Tag: collaboration

Art/Aesthetics · Book-Text-Read-Zines · Digital Media · Social/Politics · Technology

Participatory Composition: Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy

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Like. Share. Comment. Subscribe. Embed. Upload. Check in. The commands of the modern online world relentlessly prompt participation and encourage collaboration, connecting people in ways not possible even five years ago. This connectedness no doubt influences college writing courses in both form and content, creating possibilities for investigating new forms of writing and student participation. In this innovative volume, Sarah J. Arroyo argues for a “participatory composition,” inspired by the culture of online video sharing and framed by theorist Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy.

Electracy, according to Ulmer, “is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic writing.” Although electracy can be compared to digital literacy, it is not something shut on and off with the power buttons on computers or mobile devices. Rather, electracy encompasses the cultural, institutional, pedagogical, and ideological implications inherent in the transition from a culture of print literacy to a culture saturated with electronic media, regardless of the presence of actual machines.

Arroyo explores the apparatus of electracy in many of its manifestations while focusing on the participatory practices found in online video culture, particularly on YouTube. Chapters are devoted to questions of subjectivity, definition, authorship, and pedagogy. Utilizing theory and incorporating practical examples from YouTube, classrooms, and other social sites, Arroyo presents accessible and practical approaches for writing instruction. Additionally, she outlines the concept of participatory composition by highlighting how it manifests in online video culture, offers student examples of engagement with the concept, and advocates participatory approaches throughout the book.

Arroyo presents accessible and practical possibilities for teaching and learning that will benefit scholars of rhetoric and composition, media studies, and anyone interested in the cultural and instructional implications of the digital age.

Text and Image via Amazon Books

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Digital Media · Education · Social/Politics

Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (History and Foundations of Information Science)

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Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is built by a community–a community of Wikipedians who are expected to “assume good faith” when interacting with one another. In Good Faith Collaboration, Joseph Reagle examines this unique collaborative culture.

Wikipedia, says Reagle, is not the first effort to create a freely shared, universal encyclopedia; its early twentieth-century ancestors include Paul Otlet’s Universal Repository and H. G. Wells’s proposal for a World Brain. Both these projects, like Wikipedia, were fuelled by new technology–which at the time included index cards and microfilm. What distinguishes Wikipedia from these and other more recent ventures is Wikipedia’s good-faith collaborative culture, as seen not only in the writing and editing of articles but also in their discussion pages and edit histories. Keeping an open perspective on both knowledge claims and other contributors, Reagle argues, creates an extraordinary collaborative potential.

Wikipedia’s style of collaborative production has been imitated, analyzed, and satirized. Despite the social unease over its implications for individual autonomy, institutional authority, and the character (and quality) of cultural products, Wikipedia’s good-faith collaborative culture has brought us closer than ever to a realization of the century-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia.

Foreword by Lawrence Lessig
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
History and Foundation of Information Science Series
ISBN 0262014475, 9780262014472
244 pages

Text via MITPress

Download HERE

Human-ities · Performativity · Social/Politics · Technology

Revolutionary Invention: Hip-Hop and the PC

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What do hip-hop music and personal computers have in common? They were both children of the turbulent 1970s, born to innovative people who, building on inventive skills and technologies, nurtured them through creativity, collaboration, risk taking, problem solving, flexibility, and hard work. As with all inventions, their parents created them using some existing technologies. Hip-hop music evolved from adaptations of sound recording and playback equipment, while personal computers were built on integrated circuits, or “microchips,” co-invented in 1959 by Robert Noyce of Silicon Valley.

Imagine the social, cultural, economic, and political upheavals in America during the 1960s and 1970s. Picture the urban decay happening in inner-city areas of many major metropolises. Then picture the suburban communities that had burgeoned after World War II, representing the American Dream of where and how to live. Within these vastly different contexts, the Bronx, New York, and Silicon Valley, California, became places of invention—for hip-hop music and personal computers, respectively.

Excerpt from an article written by Steve Wozniak. Continue HERE

Image above: G Man and his crew DJ-ing at a park Bronx, New York, 1984 © Henry Chalfant/Silicon Valley East. Flickr photo by Andrei Z.

Education · Science · Sonic/Musical · Technology · Videos

Jason Freeman – Composition, Imagination and Collaboration

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Jason Freeman is an Associate Professor of Music in the College of Architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Art/Aesthetics · Bio · Digital Media · Performativity · Social/Politics · Technology · Theory · Videos

Jeannette Ginslov: Capturing Affect With a Handful of Techne

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On May 14, Jeannette Ginslov gave a Medea Talk about the developmental stages of the AffeXity project, the interdependence of the collaborators, the relational and dynamic formation of technical and human intervention, the encounters of the carnal and the digital, the dialogic and temporal scaffolding of encounters of techne and the hands that attempt to capture affect.

JEANNETTE GINSLOV is Medea’s artist-in-residence this spring. Her roots are as performer, choreographer and artistic director in South Africa, but for the last five years she has focused more on interdisciplinary platforms investigating the crossover between the media/dance/cinema/video and the internet.

Her work centers around affect, haptic and digital materiality on several platforms: stage, screens, online and new media applications. Ginslov is currently working with Prof Susan Kozel at Medea on the project AffeXity that draws together screendance, visual imagery and mobile networked devices.

Text Via MEDEA

Architectonic · Art/Aesthetics · Blog-Sites · Design · Projects · Public Space · Social/Politics · Theory

Department 21

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Department 21 is a project where designers, artists and architects can meet, collaborate and share working space beyond the institutional boundaries of their own disciplines.

Department 21 was set up in 2009 when a group of students at the Royal College of Art, London initiated an experimental cross-departmental studio space, thereby engendering new discussions and ways of working than had been seen in recent years at the college.

Emerging from an institutional context in which individual authorship and outcome-driven projects are the dominant frames for creative production, the project is the result of a need for new, collaborative forms of exchange between students from different disciplines: it is a means to get in touch with other peoples’ practices (and in this way question one’s own practice), as well as being a platform to support collaboration beyond specialties.

The philosophy driving Department 21 is an emancipated vision of postgraduate studentship, where all those entering a space of education have the responsibility to take a position regarding their learning process. Contrary to the commonly found format of short interdisciplinary collaboration with a secure outcome, Department 21 feels it necessary to create premises for individuals to encounter the others’ spontaneous collaborative working methods based on common interests, curiosity and critical dialogue. The ongoing research work of the project is therefore to identify, test and refine methodologies that enable this type of encounter to emerge and thrive.

Info via Department 21

Performativity · Public Space · Social/Politics · Vital-Edible-Health

Conflict Kitchen

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Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries that the United States is in conflict with. The food is served out of a take-out style storefront, which rotates identities every 6 months to highlight another country. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration is augmented by events, performances, and discussion about the culture, politics, and issues at stake with each county we focus on. We are currently presenting the third iteration of Conflict Kitchen via La Cocina Arepas, an Venezuelan take-out restaurant that serves homemade arepas, grilled corncakes served to order with a variety of fresh fillings. Developed in collaboration with members of the Venezuelan community, our arepas come packaged in a custom-designed wrapper that includes interviews with Venezuelans both in Venezuelan and the United States on subjects ranging from Venezuelan food and culture to issues of geopolitics.

www.conflictkitchen.org

Art/Aesthetics · Digital Media · Social/Politics · Technology

Woman, Art & Technology: Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson

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Woman, Art & Technology is a new series of interviews on Furtherfield. Over the next year Rachel Beth Egenhoefer will interview artists, designers, theorists, curators, and others; to explore different perspectives on the current voice of woman working in art and technology. I am honored to begin this series with an interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson, a true pioneer in the field who has recently produced !Women Art Revolution- A Secret History.

Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in a era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. She has been honored by numerous prestigious awards including the 2010-2011 d.velop digital art and 2009 SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement Awards. Hershman also recently received the 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an award which supported her latest documentary film !Women Art Revolution – A Secret History.

Via Furtherfield. Continue HERE

Digital Media · Performativity · Social/Politics

Being Social

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‘Angry Women’ by Annie Abrahams, 2011. (From photograph by Michael Szpakowski)

Since the mid-90s computers have changed our way of being together. First the Internet then mobile networks have grown as cultural spaces for interaction – wild and banal, bureaucratic and controlling – producing new ways of ‘being social’. Visitors are invited to view art installations, software art, networked performances and to get involved with creative activities to explore how our lives – personal and political – are being shaped by digital technologies.

Being Social is the opening exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park in North London. Furtherfield has established an international reputation as London’s first gallery for networked media art since 2004. With this exciting move to a more public space Furtherfield invites artists and techies – amateurs, professionals, celebrated stars and private enthusiasts – to engage with local and global, everyday and epic themes in a process of imaginative exchange.

This exhibition brings together artworks by emerging and internationally acclaimed artists: Annie Abrahams, Karen Blissett, Ele Carpenter, Emilie Giles, moddr_ , Liz Sterry and Thomson and Craighead.

Via Furtherfield

Events · Sonic/Musical

The Global Composition: Call for scientific, scholarly and artistic proposals

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Sound is ubiquitous and permanent, and embraces us as an envelope. Therefore, the experience of the auditory can be considered an environmental experience par excellence. The term and concept of soundscape reflects this idea. It implies, that sounds do not exist in isolation, and have to be understood as being embedded in and interacting with other sounds and perceptions coining the perceptional abilities of individuals and societies and their social relations: soundscape is a system in which all elements are interdependent.


No sound exists on its own: The Global Composition

Considering the world’s objects as instruments, its inhabitants as their players and all sounds on the globe taking place simultaneously, leads to the imagination of a global composition. Any audible phenomenon is part of this huge ongoing concert which includes all living beings and unites them in – mostly unintentional and uncoordinated – collaboration. Soundmakers, listeners and those, requesting sounds as a commodity, are part of a system and often one and the same person.

The Global Composition