The Medium is Not the Message: On the Future of New Media Studies by Florian Kramer [to Graduates of The Media Department of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, September 2011]:

Dear graduates,

Let me make a wild guess: Perhaps it has become more difficult for you to say what media are – and what media studies are – than a few years ago when you began to study them. A paradox of “media” is that, in our time, they seem to be everywhere at first glance yet nowhere when it comes to critical study. Every person on the street would agree that our everyday life is permeated by electronic media, the Internet, mobile phones, electronic gadgets. Everyone is aware of their economic impact. Even the link between these communication technologies to cultural and social movements is not esoteric anymore, in the year after WikiLeaks and two days after the Pirate Party won nine percent at the state elections in Berlin. Continue reading

New Collaborative Research Projects In Digital Media Arts – An Integral Component Of UCSC’s Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program :: Deadline: January 3, 2012.

The Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz is initiating new collaborative research projects in the context of the program’s ongoing research. Collaborating with faculty and contributing to digital media arts research is a critical component of each student’s experience in the DANM MFA program. MFA students entering in Fall 2012 will have the opportunity to collaborate on the following projects: Continue reading

Robert Lue: Using Art to Express and Advance the Scientific Process :: December 7, 2011; 6:00 pm :: EMPAC (Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY :: FREE + Open to the public.

Robert Lue, biologist and director of life sciences education at Harvard, will discuss the vital and transformative role that visualizations play in both science research and education. Lue is the founder of BioVisions, a collaborative initiative led by Harvard scientists to improve the beauty and precision of science visualization. Continue reading

Cathy Davidson, Duke University from The Politics of Digital Culture on Vimeo.

Hacking the Academy: A Book Crowdsourced in One Week: MPublishing, the publishing division of the University of Michigan Library, is pleased to announce the open-access version of Hacking the Academy, The Edited Volume. The volume is forthcoming in print under the University of Michigan Press digitalculturebooks imprint.

This volume was assembled and edited by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt from the best of over 300 submissions received during a spirited week when the two editors actively solicited ideas for how the academy could be beneficially reformed using digital media and technology. For more on the unusual way this book was put together, please start with Cohen and Scheinfeldt’s preface. Continue reading

The Assignment Book: A project by Luis Camnitzer :: September 21 – October 16, 2011 :: Opening: September 21; 6:30 – 9:00 pm :: Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons, The New School for Design, 66 5th Ave @ 13th Street, New York City.

“In The Assignment Book I am trying to bridge the distance between artist and viewer, and start a dialogue and collective research instead of merely communicating by way of a monologue. I would like to share unresolved and sometimes ridiculous conundrums and questions that hopefully lead to critical inter- and multidisciplinary thinking, and unleash similar but collectively generated stimuli. Not unlike the blog format, answers and suggestions should enter the exhibition space so that the stage is shared with the visitors, leading to deinsitutionalized learning: Learning Without a School. In this I abandon the traditional declarative stance of the artist/teacher. Being accountable for how I deal with the assignments I become an unprotected artist/learner.” – Luis Camnitzer Continue reading

Berkman Center for Internet and Society presents Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn — Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University and co-founder of HASTAC :: September 20, 2011; 6:00 pm :: Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA. Location TBA :: Free and Open to the Public; RSVP required.

When Duke University gave free iPods to the freshman class in 2003, critics called it a waste of money. Yet when students found academic uses for the brand new music devices in virtually every discipline, the iPod experiment proved to be a classic example of the power of disruption – a way of refocusing attention to illuminate unseen possibilities. Continue reading

Ultra-red | Art, Collectivity, and Pedagogy: Changing the World in which we Live, Chto delat?:

The art world is going through a period of intense fascination with collectives. This is often combined with an enthusiastic interest in pedagogy. Curators, critics and institutions champion collectivity and pedagogy as, among other things, an alternative or corrective, if you will, to the art-star economy of the 1990s and its spectacular demise. These recent interests have benefited from the enormous influence of the French philosopher, Jacques Ranciиre. Seeking an explicitly political inflection in the terms of pedagogy and collectivity, many have turned to Ranciиre’s writings on spectatorship and the emancipatory potential in art. This appropriation in the visual art context has tended to ignore the extent to which Ranciиre’s own thinking occurs within a nexus of pedagogy and the collectivities that occur in performance. Continue reading

[Image: “Pragmatic Geography” by Luis Camnitzer, courtesy Alexander Gray Associates] Posted on [iDC] by Trebor Scholz: Dear all,

Many of you on this list have participated in discussions around the Free Cooperation conference in 2004, Share Widely in 2005, Situated Technologies one year later and recently The Internet as Playground and Factory. In the context of these large-scale events, we did not use social media as secondary publicity but as canvases of as yet unthought practices and understudied or sidelined areas of enquiry that are able to meaningfully engage publics in discourse- from the German media theorist Christoph Spehr’s theory of free (versus forced) cooperation to commercial and governmental surveillance, digital labor, mobile education and self-learning through the lens of Austrian theorist Ivan Illich and the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. Continue reading

Reconfiguring Site: New Approaches to Public Art and Architecture :: July 11 – August 9, 2011 :: School of Visual Art, NYC.

Crossing the boundaries into architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, new media technologies and other arenas, the revitalization of public art has become a global trend, as more sensitivity to the nuance of site is increasingly valued. This residency will delve into a process that reflects key site-specific aspects and intrinsic elements: scale, history, social meaning and formal aesthetics.