Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
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While the new materiality of digitized media content has radically challenged the music and film industry, the publishing industry seemed to feel comfortable neglecting the changing reality of the media business. But then major news papers blamed their decreasing revenues on freely accessible web content, and paint a dark picture of a future lacking proper journalism and diverse media, most ominously, the vanishing of printed papers and magazines. Time for a reality check: It appears that there is not only a demand for print but there are also smart publishers producing innovative print products.
Monday, June 14 at 17.00, well-known media theorist and founder of the Software Studies Initiative Lev Manovich will visit Utrecht to give a lecture on Cultural Analytics, his ongoing project aimed at using interactive visualisations to analyse massive cultural data sets.
Date April 2010 / Category News
Hosted by the Institute for Network Cultures a conference focused on Wikipedia from a critical point of view. Core issues were the politics behind the collective encyclopaedia, the processes of collaboration, the unfolding power structures and the creation of knowledge. A group of students affiliated with Utrecht's New Media and Digital Culture covered talks and interviewed speakers.
Report on the conference Wikipedia. A Critical Point of View (pdf; in Dutch)
Conference summary, resources and videos at the Institute for Network Cultures
Date January 2010 / Category News
Upstreams & Downstreams (Piracy, Data Retention & Surveillance) is the first Skip Intro Session, a lecture series on politics and citizenship in the 21-century. The meeting will take place on Wednesday January 20 from 19.30-21.30 in Studio T (Kromme Nieuwegracht 20, 3512 HH Utrecht). Controversial media practises and politics are discussed by the following speakers:
- Jaromil (dyne.org, http://www.rastasoft.org)
- Ilpo Koskinen (University of Arts & Design Helsinki, http://www2.uiah.fi/~ikoskine)
- Joris van Hoboken (Bits of Freedom, https://www.bof.nl/)
Date October 2009 / Category News
For 20 years now, the crew around Arjon Dunnewind has brought together artists and scholars from all over the world to present and discuss in an annual festival the latest in media development, reflect on trends and aesthetics in media art and everyday life. This year's edition of the Impakt festival in Utrecht, "Accelerated Living" is revolving around the experience of time.
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From the outside it looks like an oversized camping tent, from the inside it is more like a space station. World in a Shell is a complete high-tech living environment that perfectly fits into a standard freight container.
While other newspapers have recently decided to lock their content behind paid-access gates or even exclude it from search engines, the Guardian chooses a timely approach for its archive. With the Guardian Open Platform, the British newspaper makes its archive accessible for users who can integrate the content into all kinds of mash-up sites and web applications. The benefits are mutual, of course: while users gain access to a large archive of newspaper content, the Guardian turns dead data into a dynamic resource that will thrive on the labour of others and simultaneously reach audiences for advertising.
Date April 2010 / Category News
SetUp is an initiative that aims at establishing a permanent medialab in Utrecht. For the next three month the abandoned ABN Amro building at the Neude serves as playground, work space and meeting place for the various stakeholders and participants in new media development in Utrecht.
Date November 2009 / Category News
Rumour has it that Charles Babbage, a very self confident inventor, exclaimed in 1821 when recognizing many calculation errors in a set of mathematical tables: “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!”
Date August 2009 / Category News
Urban space is characterized by a large numbers of signs, displaying information, channelling traffic, attracting our attention for a variety of means: Memorial tablets, brand logos, billboards, traffic guidance systems, information boards, graffiti, road signs, prohibition signs, and instruction plates constitute an inseparable part of everyday life and shape cultural identity as well as urban environment. With some help of his family Markus Hanzer documented a vast number of signs in urban space, displayed at the Vienna Museumsquartier in an exhibition entitled: Krieg der Zeichen. Spurenlese im urbanen Raum.
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