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
Date March 2007 / Category News
The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague exhibits 'The Sixties' (January 20 - April 30 2007). For visitors not familiar with the dutch contribution to minimal art and concept art the exhibition offers some valuable insight. Unfortunately that is all 'The Sixties' can offer. While there would be many accounts to approach the 1960ies the curators seem not to have chosen one. The 60ies media situation and the media usage in art, activism and politics alone, would have offered an interesting approach to this era and could have been inspiring for reflecting media practice in digital age.
It is rather a collection of stuff that would widely be associated with that particular era, but it would be difficult to recognize an attempt to contextualize the presented objects. Art, fashion, furniture and media clippings are assembled and provoke elder visitors to nostalgic reactions. The displayed film fragments remind of MTV-style video clips and are accompanied by 60ies music. To younger visitors the incoherent collection would rather acknowledge the vague picture of the 'roaring sixties' mainstream media shaped in the blurring rear mirror of presentation. Unfortunately there is little attempt to explain the inconsistencies and socio-political frictions that were so much contributing to the cultural production and social efforts of that time. The dutch Volkskrant says it should have been more emphasized that the drive behind the "little revolution" was not essentially art, but students, hippies and activists who turned against the hypocritical and repressive politics.
Date January 2007 / Category News
A plethora of different tools are supposed to help the user to get along with a certain software application. FAQs, Wikis, forums, read-me texts, tutorials, manuals and the documentation should help the user to set up and use the software. These tools are frequently provided in a misleading way and often difficult to understand. In discussion with software designer Patrick Kranzlmüller we asked whether a solution would be based on an improved information management system or on a different way of organizing the development process. The Austrian communication scientist Theo Hug pointed us to the terminology of Microlearning. In microlearning we recognized the teach yourself processes that are established practices in digital culture. But further more microlearning can offer a way to diminish the gap between users and developers.
In our article "RTFM! Teach-Yourself Culture in Open Source Software Projects" we evaluate tools used for documenting and explaining software and analyze how microlearning could offer a methodology for integrating the user and stimulating the teach yourself processes. In consequence a list of recommendations for software developers is provided. Communicating the complexity of software to users is not only a matter of information design but a social challenge, too.
SUBversionen, a conference in Germany is questioning subversive strategies. The avant-garde of artists, activists and the tactical use of media are often alleged being subversive.
I teamed with Hans Bernhard from Ubermorgen.com. whose self-acclaimed media hacking is often described as being subversive. But is the subversion of the toywar, vote-auction.com or Google Will Eat Itself overturning socio-political circumstances or are they test configurations which are exploited by the establishment efficiently.
The problem with subversion is firstly, that it is often attribution in retrospective to artistic works. Secondly, subversion is associated with coolness, resistance and opposition to the status quo. A canon of signs developed that is shaping a picture of what is perceived as subversively. Obviously these signs are easy to incorporate into advertisement and popular culture.
Thirdly, the perception of subversion is distracting the focus from those who are efficiently using subversive strategies, such as public relation companies, advertisement, politicians, etc.
In our presentation we argue that strategies artists and activists use are often implemented into the methods of communication in the field of public relation, advertisement and politics. That way subversion is actually stabilizing the system.
Date December 2005 / Category News
The city of Vienna is following a new approach in funding art. Artists in the field of netart will not apply for grants at a city’s department but dispose them among the community themselves. A software based voting system called Mana will be installed for delegating votes and credits within the netart community’s participants. NetzNetz, the platform of the Viennese netartists was founded in opposition to Public Netbase that was obtaining the majority of the city’s funding for new media art projects.
The start up of the new funding model is accompanied by the conference Parliaments of Art.
Read my contribution Making Sense of Discourse.
Tags conference
An overwhelming majority of the EU Parliament's members rejected the directive "on the patentability of computer implemented inventions", also known as the software patent directive.
Thanks to the information campaigns of concerned citizens and responsible politicians Europe's IT companies and software developing communities are able to proceed providing innovation and building up a growing cultural ressource.
More at FFII
Date March 2007 / Category News
The Creative Commons Netherlands organized a workshop on open content and education. The term “open content” often causes a lot of misunderstanding. Often “user generated content” or free accessible material from online sources, such as netlabels, flickr sites, wikipedia are described as “open content”. The term “open access” therefore was recognized as more appropriate, especially since the workshop focused on teaching material for schools.
The discussion centered around two aspects:
Quality control and peer review were recognized as crucial aspects in publishing open content for education. Publishing houses were considered as able to organize the peer review process and function as a 'gatekeeper' in order to evaluate publications according to quality criteria. The maintenance of a cultural resource emerging through production of open content is important. Institutions or communities have to develop strategies to administer the material.
A dutch summary of the workshop is provided on the Creative Commons Netherlands website.
Tags copyright open-access
Date October 2006 / Category News
After Neurath at Stroom is covering the actual interest in the heritage of Neurath and Arntz, starting with a symposium on October 31st and November 1st with Frank Hartmann, Robin Kinross, Kristóf Nyíri and Femke Snelting.
Stroom -based in The Hague- is organizing a series of events on Otto Neurath and his influence on graphic and information design. Neurath and Gerd Arntz, an artist and graphic designer, emigrated to the Netherlands in the 1930s, where they continued their work on ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education). The Hague's Gemeentemuseum does not only display a work of art of Gerd Arntz but keeps also a large collection of the ISOTYPE publications, the linocuts for printing the pictograms and display boards from exhibitions which used the ISOTYPE system. With ISOTYPE Neurath and Arntz turned the numbers of statistics into comprehensible pictures. Driven by the educational ideal to bring knowledge to illiterates they made information accessible in pictures which should enable their audience to develop an understanding of sociopolitical contexts.
For more information on Otto Neurath, see:
Paul Rotha (1946) From Hieroglyphs to ISOTYPE and Frank Hartmann (2002) Bildersprache Otto Neurath Visualisierungen
Date January 2006 / Category News
Austrian gutter press and politicians are mad about the art project "25 peaces" which consists of artists' contributions on Europe. Three posters have been heavely criticised because of their motives. They feature a group sex scene with the participants wearing Bush, Chirac and G.W. Bush masks, a swastika as one of the European stars, and "the origin of the world" covered with an European-flag-panty.
It is not surprising that a right-conservative newspaper such as the Austrian Kronen Zeitung is arguing against the display of the motives in question (although they display naked women in each issue) and it is even funny that the Nazis of the Freedom Party are criticising the motive displaying the swastika. But it is very dangerous that politicians take part in judging what art is and what it is not, that obviously politicians of all parties have become art critics over night.
Even more disturbing is their understanding of art, expecting public relation tasks and advertisement purposes from art and artists. As the Austrian minister for foreign affairs mentioned, the motives in question were not helpful in communicating Europe to the citizens. In my opinion the politicians of all Austrian parties did a very poor job in communicating Europe to their citizens. In opposite to the artists this would have been their job.
The criticised works were removed from the exhibition. That's Austria in 2006.
A very good article on the subject was published in Der Standard: Verlogene Machteliten.
The origin of the narrow-minded outrage: Tanja Ostojic's contribution.
Website of 25 peaces.
During the last semester I was supervising a group of new media students. They work on various topics related to new media and computer technology. As different as their interest are their papers; they cover a dazzling array of topics and all of them bring up important issues. Here is a selection of the papers I found most interesting.
Koen Leurs: Exploring pedophilia: a pragmatic inventory of the pedophilic discourse observed from a digital media perspective (bachelor thesis)
Koen Leurs provides a foucauldian analysis of the discourse on paedophilia. He identifies the different participants and actors within this discourse and the various strategies and technologies they use. The paper was presented on the Netporn Conference.
Download the thesis as pdf.
Bram Timmers: Netlabels and Open Content (master thesis)
In his thesis Bram Timmers maps the emerging cultural production of netlabels and analyzes production and distribution processes online as an alternative mode of the culture industry. Download the thesis as pdf.
This big volume, edited by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, covers a lot of perspectives on computer games. From the history of computer games and their pre-history (slot machines) to the design and the reception of games a broad range of issues are discussed in this book. Contributors come from various fields such as social sciences, psychology, cultural studies and game design.
MIT Press
Tags Book